Preschool Pumpkin Lessons

One thing I love about homeschool preschool is all the excuses to cook and just get nice and messy.  This Preschool pumpkin lesson was a great opportunity to get a little messy for our homeschool Halloween.

This is a multi-step process we went through.  I saw a couple of different posts from some blogs I read, mainly Household Ways and Blessings Overflowing talking about homemade pumpkin puree, and pumpkin seeds, and it got me thinking of the wonderful lessons that can come from that.

Preschool Pumpkin Lessons: language arts

We carved our pumpkins out and worked on using descriptive words of what the inside felt like and what did the outside feel like.  We all agreed it felt slimy, and the inside walls of the skeleton felt slimy.

We also then went on to write a pumpkin book.

Pumpkin lessons for preschool: math

We counted how many ribs it had.  I’m planning on next year having them do a whole math unit about pumpkins, but that wasn’t for this year.

Then I quartered it so we could more easily get the stringies out and because that would fit in my pan best.

Pumpkin Science

Our Pumpkin Science was its own post, of Will a Pumpkin Float?, but we could also have focused on the pumpkin life cycle with this pumpkin life cycle coloring page (admittedly that didn’t exist when the kids and I did our Preschool Pumpkin lessons, but the idea…)

Preschool Pumpkin Lessons: life skills

We cooked it for almost two hours to get it nice and soft, and learned about patience and why we cooked it the way we did.

Then we learned about how the pumpkin had changed after cooking it, now it felt soft and squishy.

And of course, we cooked with it.  We made this yummy pumpkin scone recipe I found here.

Actually, I’ve made that recipe twice.  And both times I think they might have lasted an hour.  Maybe………

And finally, we roasted them.  Which was not the wildly popular snack I was hoping for.  Unfortunately, I didn’t let them all dry correctly, so I didn’t get to try out the various different recipes I was going to for pumpkin seeds.  Oh well.

But wait there’s more!  Coming soon to a home near you, or more accurately, my home.  I’ve been slowly transferring the pictures of the step-by-step process into a table (to maintain uniform page size), and I’m printing them off as we speak to have them tell me what happened in the pictures.

It’s going to be exciting!  There will be untold mysteries of what they will decide to tell me is happening.  Stay tuned for the update.    Read all about our pumpkin writing assignment.

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