How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?
Pumpkins, pumpkins, and more pumpkins! These big, round, orange fruits take center stage from Halloween through Thanksgiving.
Bring pumpkins into your classroom to engage your students in science, and don’t forget the picture books. Pairing fiction and nonfiction picture books to teach science is explained in the Picture Perfect Science series and Teaching Science Through Trade Books.
Authors Emily Morgan and Karen Ansberry suggest How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? (fiction) and Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden (nonfiction) to kick off a science inquiry lesson on pumpkins.
A pumpkin is a fruit?
Yes! Even though we often refer to pumpkins as vegetables, they’re actually the fruits of a pumpkin plant.
This lesson features pumpkins to explore the similarities/differences between fruits and vegetables.
It’s a good follow-up to a lesson on plant parts.
Both of these lessons are based on Molly’s Organic Farm, a picture book that uniquely combines both fiction and nonfiction.