Teacher Work Days

We had a great time at the museum last Friday at our Teacher Work Day program about pumpkins! Here's some pictures of our activities.

 We took some time to brainstorm design ideas that we could use for our pumpkins and drew them out.

 Then, we estimated how big around our pumpkin was by cutting a string. Estimating is like guessing. It was a challenge to decide how long the string needed to be to reach all the way around the fattest part of the pumpkin. Once everyone had their string, we tested the lengths. We sorted our strings into groups that were too long, too short, or pretty close. We even had to add another group for the strings that were exactly right!

 We were very good at estimating length! You can see that almost all our strings were pretty close or spot on!

 After we estimated length, we estimated how many seeds were in the pumpkin. This was much harder, because we couldn't see inside yet. So, we cut it open. Everyone helped to get the seeds and goo out of the pumpkin, then separate the seeds from the pulp.

 We put the seeds in piles of 10 so that we could count them more easily. We had 522 seeds in our pumpkin!

After our snack and story break, we talked about how Native Americans used dried pumpkin to weave mats. We tried our hand at weaving some place mats of our own, but we used paper instead of pumpkin!

Happy Halloween!

Next Monday is also a Teacher Work Day, so we will be having another Teacher Work Day program. This time, our topic will be Maps and Mazes. Where are you going? How will you get there? Join us as we climb through a giant string maze, interact with some satellite maps, and get excited about geography! Call 977-1025 to register today!