Its pumpkin season! Each year we love to take a trip out to our local pick-your-own and choose some lovely pumpkins to decorate our front door and our deck for the autumn. If, for some reason, we don’t make it to a pick-your-own then we make sure to pop a few pumpkins into the weekly shopping trolly when they start apprearing in the grocery store.
Be that as it may, October is the perfect month to recall a wonderful pumpkin nature study that we undertook in our homeschool. I hope that you enjoy this post from the archives.
This weeks homeschool nature study is on pumpkins. We are so excited about this study because this year we planted our very own pumpkin seeds and have been observing their growth and development for months.
We have observed each stage, from nurturing that little seed in the early spring, to planting outdoors and watching it ramble, grow, flower, and fruit.
As we read through the lesson in the Handbook of Nature Study, we recalled each characteristic of our pumpkins.
When we got to the part that describes the rather prickly stems, one of the girls recalled how she had stepped barefoot on the stalk while washing the car. Ouch! That’s personal experience for you!
Once we had done a bit of reading and chatting, we brought in 3 of our pumpkins, harvested only a few weeks ago, and set them out on the kitchen counter. We cut one in half so that we could observe the inside of the fruit as described in the Handbook of Nature.
Our study ended up becoming a bit of unit study of sorts, when you have an open pumpkin you simply cannot just leave it at that! You have to cook it too!
We scrapped out the seeds and set about to toasting them – a favourite autumn snack of ours!
We also roasted our pumpkin and turned it into Roast Pumpkin Soup – now in the freezer and waiting to be eaten up on Bonfire Night!
We used our pumpkins to do an art project – I had pinned this great tutorial onto my ‘Homeschool Art Ideas’Pinterest board a few months ago. So we drew light outlines of our pumpkins onto water colour paper, then went over the lines with glue.
Once the glue had dried, we used a black fine-liner to trace around out glue lines and then filled in with water-color.
We love the results!
I use affiliate links in some blog posts. If you click through and make a purchase, the owner earns a small commission at no extra cost to yourself. Thank you for your support
oh, I hope you framed these…I LOVE them!!!!!!
An excellent pumpkin study and growing experiment. I love how the art project turned out. Thank you for posting the link to the tutorial–looks like fun!
Awesome study! Loved your pumpkin images and the artwork is lovely! Thanks so much for sharing your OHC with the blog carnival.
Love the effects you did with the glue, marker, and watercolors. Lovely!