The wonderful thing about doing a little preschool at home with my toddler is getting to do school in our pajamas!

This is the last week of our October Break, so we busted out some preschool pumpkin investigation activities for “school time” this week!  Here’s a look at these preschool Halloween math and science pumpkin investigations…. and a peek at my cutie in October pajamas! 🙂

Preschool Pumpkin science Observations

The first day, we “observed” the outside of our pumpkin and talked about what we noticed that our little pumpkin had…

My sweet preschool scientist observed a “boo-boo” on the bottom…

 a stem…

And I helped him notice the bumps on the outside of the pumpkin…

 

my pumpkin book

We wrote our observations in our preschool pumpkin investigation book.  (Side note…forgive some of my printouts as my printer ran out of black ink and I couldn’t get more in time to finish this week! BOO!)

We read the sentence together and then Cooper found the picture to match the text in our book.

We glued the picture in our pumpkin book…

And traced the words with our very, very special “pumpkin pen.”  My little has problems using enough pressure to write with crayon, so I decided to try the special pen so he wouldn’t have to use as much pressure…I wanted him to be able to see what he was writing and the pen helped with that!

Adding dots under the words of our books really helps Cooper with his pointing, so I added tiny pumpkins under each word to help his pointing…works like a charm!

 

 

Pumpkin alphabet Match

After we worked on our pumpkin book, we matched upper and lowercase letters.  Even though my preschool pumpkin investigation activities resource has all of the letters, I decided to only match 6 letters at a time to make it less overwhelming for Coop.  Plus, since my printer was out of black ink, it probably wouldn’t have helped to print all of them out this week! 😉

He loved finding matches!  We even played the “real” way with the cards turned upside down.  This was a little harder for him to do because he tried to turn over two capitals to match…easy fix for this next time we play (or when you play with your toddler) is that I’ll add a sticker to the back of the cards…one color for the capitals and one color for the lowercase so he can easily tell to match one from each color!

 

 

pumpkin insides

The second day, we worked on observing the inside of our pumpkin.  We took this project outside since we would have a bit of a mess!  We did most of our work in the large plastic tub to help with clean up, which worked great!

 

Sweet Cooper does not like messes at all…which has its perks, but the down side is he refuses to stick his hand in a pumpkin!  So, I made him come up with another way to get the seeds and pulp out.  Little stinker is a creative thing!

 

We talked about the vocabulary words “seeds” and “pulp” and I had him show me each one…poor stem broke off of our pumpkin!

Then, we took turns filling our tiny pumpkin with dirt…

 planted the seeds…

 added some water…

and found a special spot in the sun for our pumpkin planter…. how cute is the underwear peeking out?!?

Years ago, before our animal unit was moved to October, I did pumpkin investigations with my first graders for some Halloween science and math. We planted seeds in our big “class” pumpkin….but I loved using this mini-pumpkin for Cooper.  It was the perfect size for my little tot! 🙂

As we talked about our vocabulary words during our pumpkin observations, we added our vocab cards to our “pumpkin word wall” upstairs at our school station!  We added pumpkin and stem on day one, seeds and pulp on day two when we cut the pumpkin open, and then added sprout and vine after we planted the seeds so Cooper would know what we were watching for!

pumpkin math counting collections

Then, we came inside and washed our seeds to count!  I just slipped the page for pumpkin seed counting in a ziploc bag to protect it from the slimy seeds.

When we do pumpkins in first grade, we count our seeds counting collection style…but for my little tot, I wanted him to just work on building sets of seeds to match numbers.  He had a blast doing this!  I even saved the seeds after we toasted them so that he can use them over and over!

pumpkin cookies

We finished up our preschool pumpkin investigation activities by making these amazing pumpkin cookies together so that Cooper could try out a little pumpkin! Pinterest for the win again!

Cooper had so much fun with these preschool pumpkin investigation activities!  And mommy had fun making memories and learning all wrapped up in one!