Margaret McNamara has written the perfect book to introduce the pumpkin seed investigation. In How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin, Charlie’s class attempts to answer this very question. Charlie, the smallest child in class, also has the smallest pumpkin. To everyone’s great surprise, Charlie’s pumpkin has the most seeds.

In the book, each group skip counts by a different number to see which is fastest. The students in 1S all agree that counting by tens is the fastest! The class divided into three groups. Each group had a different sized pumpkin. Each group estimated how many seeds their pumpkin would have, and then they gutted the pumpkins and began to verify how many seeds were in their pumpkin.

As in the book, the smallest pumpkin had the most seeds and the largest pumpkin had the least amount of seeds.

A fun time was had by all!

Leslie Sem
1st Grade Teacher