Pumpkins

Pumpkins!

We haven’t talked about the letter P yet so we didn’t focus so much
on that, but since Halloween is tomorrow, I though it would be fun to
carve a pumpkin and roast the seeds.

We had some fun and laughed today too, but we also had a few fails.
I’ll tell you all about them so that you can learn from my mistakes.

Book

Since we were going to make a Jack-o-Lantern and be working with a giant Costco sized pumpkin, I decided to share one of my most favorite Halloween stories of all time – “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”

To be honest, I’d never seen it as a book before so when I came across this one, I couldn’t pass it up.

Flashcards

We reviewed the flashcards today and tried our Halloween words again. It was almost as fun as on Monday.

Song

We skipped the song today so that we could go outside and carve the pumpkin. This was our first fail. There’s a great song called 5 Little Pumpkins that would have been great for today. Swing and a miss.

Tracing Page

Fail number 2 – we skipped this one too. I wish I’d done a custom one with the word PUMPKIN on it a few times. Because we haven’t covered most of those letters, it would have been a good opportunity to see where they’re at with their pencils instead of just skipping it.

Activity

I was SO excited about carving the Jack-o-Lantern. We had a gigantic pumpkin and I thought for sure that the kids would be all about getting elbow deep inside that pumpkin. Then we would clean off the seeds and mix them with some brown sugar, honey, and vanilla and roast them up. I found a recipe here that sounded delicious!

Neither little stinker would put a hand in the pumpkin!! We got Lucy to stick her hand in it but as soon as something touched her, she started freaking out and ran away, screaming. Nixon wouldn’t go near it.

I pulled all the seeds out and left Jared to finish scraping the insides and cut the face out. The kids ran around in the backyard playing tag (and fighting over the slide), and I brought the seeds inside to roast them.

Fail number 3 – I didn’t read the instructions on the recipe beforehand. I read the ingredients to make sure I had them all, but I didn’t read the actual instructions.

I’ve roasted pumpkin seeds before, but it’s been at least 10 years. I forgot that they have to completely dry before you mix them with the other ingredients and roast them. That means they have to sit out for 24 hours.

Ugh.

I got them all cleaned off and set out on a cookie sheet on some paper towels to dry them out. Guess we’re going to have to wait until Friday to roast them.

All Done!

Obviously, there’s room for improvement on this one. If I were to do it again, I would clean out the pumpkin the day before and have the seeds ready to roast. For the activity, we would mix the seeds with the ingredients together instead of carving the pumpkin, and we’d either paint a pumpkin or we’d do a “build your own Jack-o-Lantern” with construction paper cut-outs.

We would do a tracing page that said PUMPKIN and we would have some sort of pumpkin treat like pumpkin bread or chocolate chip pumpkin cookies or something. And we would definitely sing the 5 Little Pumpkins song.

Happy Halloween! (Day 2)