This week we were all about pumpkins and used these as a context for learning across the curriculum, incorporating literacy, numeracy and maths, science, expressive arts and health and well-being but more importantly we had a lot of fun learning!

In teams we became scientists and took part in a pumpkin investigation using many skills including turn taking, observing, explaining, problem solving, predicting, estimating, measuring, testing and recording our thoughts and findings. We could not believe that pumpkins actually sink despite being quite heavy! This led us into doing a more in depth learning about floating and sinking later in the week.

We used the book Pumpkin Soup to link our learning this week and decided to make some soup just like Duck, Cat and Squirrel in the story. But before we could do this we needed to write some shopping lists and look at lots of different recipes books. We even went into the garden and found some lovely carrots and potatoes to use in our soup! Miss Thompson was so proud of us all and the writing we produced. It was a challenging job but we can do anything we set our mind to in P1! 

Here we are enjoying our soup once and if the hard work chopping, cutting, stirring and cooking had been done.

Another pumpkin learning task we worked hard on was a S.T.E.M challenge in small cooperative groups. The challenge was to design and create a ‘pumpkin platform’ as a group. It had to be as high as we could get it but still steady and strong. Just look at some of the design ideas we had. The highest platform got the pumpkin 16 cubes high off of the floor!

Overall, we loved using pumpkins in lots of our learning and play this week!