Pumpkin Lines

I learned something new about pumpkins this year, from a book that I checked out from the library for our pumpkin study this month. How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin? follows a school class that tries to determine which pumpkin (of 3 different sizes) has the most seeds inside. The class is surprised to find out that the smallest pumpkin had the most seeds, and discovered that that same pumpkin also had the most lines on the outside. Did you know the number of lines on the outside of a pumpkin is correlated to the number of seeds inside? Apparently the longer a pumpkin stays on a vine, the more lines it develops along with the seed strings inside. I never knew!

I was excited to draw attention to the lines on the pumpkins because recognizing lines is an early literacy skill that I especially focus on during the first half of the school year. After I read the story with the class, we counted lines on lots of our pumpkins and made guesses about which ones would have more or less seeds. We discovered that many of our pumpkins had the exact same amount of lines- which makes sense considering we harvested all of the pumpkins at the same time, so many of them had been growing for the same amount of time.

Last week we did some crayon resist, watercolor art and used lines to learn to draw the shape of a pumpkin. First we used a round line to draw a circle, and then we put curved lines inside of it.

After drawing the outline with crayon, we filled in the pumpkin with watercolors. 

Every pumpkin turned out differently- some with lots of lines and some with lots of colors!

I loved how this simple process was another way to think about the lines on a pumpkin.