(bright upbeat music) - Hello, little learners.

Welcome back to our Pre-K and TK classroom.

My name is Miss Lara.

Can you tell me your name?

Ooh, hello, welcome.

Today is day one of the five days that we're going to be together.

Let me add a magnet to our 10 frame.

One.

Now, can you guess what our theme is this week?

Yes, we're going to learn all about pumpkins.

Now, have you ever been to a pumpkin patch, or have you been going to the grocery stores and see pumpkins laying around?

It's that time of year where we carve pumpkins and see them all around us, so I thought it would be a good idea for us to learn just a little bit about them.

We're going to read stories about pumpkins this week, and we're going to make pumpkin oobleck, and a five little pumpkins arts and crafts activity, and have lots of pumpkin fun.

So I hope you join me.

For now, I want us to start off with a little pumpkin song.

Now for this song, you're going to need five fingers.

You're going to need a gate, and you're going to need a spooky face.

I'll show you what to do.

The song is called "Five Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate."

So here's our gate, and here's our pumpkins.

Are you ready?

Five little pumpkin sitting on a gate, the first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late."

The second one said, "Ooh, there are witches in the air."

The third one said, "But we don't care."

The fourth one said "Let's run, and run, and run."

But the fifth one said, "I'm ready for some fun."

Here's your spooky face.

Ready?

Ooh, went the wind, and out went the light, and the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

What did you think of that song?

Was it fun?

You'll get to do that with me all week long.

So when you see me, get your five pumpkins ready.

Right now, I think Miss Maria left us a letter that's gonna give us a clue about the book we're gonna read.

Let's see.

(doorbell rings) Miss Maria, what letter have you left us today?

Here's our letter.

And of course, when we read, we always start at the left and slide to the right, and we have our new left and right song.

♪ When I read words, I read left to right ♪ ♪ Left to right ♪ ♪ Left to right ♪ ♪ When I read words, I read left to right ♪ ♪ That's how I become a strong reader ♪ So let's read our words.

Are you ready?

"Dear Miss Lara, Do pumpkins come in all shapes and sizes?"

What do you think?

Have you ever been to a pumpkin patch, and kind of looked around?

Are all pumpkins the same?

Hmm.

"Can pumpkins be a rectangle or a square?"

I've never seen a square pumpkin or a rectangle one.

The ones I've seen are oval or round.

"I am a pumpkin with edges.

Am I alone?"

Oh, no, a pumpkin with edges.

I've never seen that, but actually come to find out, I don't know too much about pumpkins.

Let's see if Miss Maria has a book in here about pumpkins and how they come to be.

Let me see here.

Here is our book.

It is called, "From Seed to Pumpkin, by Wendy Pfeffer, and it's illustrated by James Hale.

Now you can see in the front cover that there are a lot of children playing with pumpkin seeds on a pumpkin patch, and all the pumpkins I see are round.

I wonder if there's gonna be any rectangle pumpkins in here.

Let's take a look.

Ooh, yellow flowers.

Let's see.

"When spring winds warm the earth, a farmer plants hundreds of pumpkin seeds."

So you can see there's the farmer there planting the pumpkin seeds, and the boys and girls, and even a dog are running around to try to plant them with him.

"Every pumpkin seed can become a baby pumpkin plant.

Underground, covered with dark moist soil, the baby plants begin to grow."

Now, do you notice anything about the soil?

Do you see this guy right here?

That's a worm.

He actually helps aerate our soil.

That means when he goes through the soil, he makes it nice and good for the pumpkin seeds to grow.

"As the plants get bigger, the seeds crack open, stems sprout up, roots dig down.

Inside the roots are tubes.

Water travels up the tubes the way juice goes up a straw."

So you can see, here's the seed, and there's little tubes called the roots that are going down to where the water isn't (Miss Lara sucks) sucking it up to the seed, because all plants need water to grow.

"In less than two weeks from planting time, green shoots poke up through the earth.

These shoots will grow into tiny seedlings.

Two leaves called seed leaves uncurl on each stem.

They reach up toward the sun."

So look, it tells you here how long it takes for a pumpkin to grow.

Two weeks.

And then the little stem comes up and reaches toward the sun.

"Sunlight gives these leaves energy to make food.

Like us, plants need food to grow, but green plants do not eat food as we do.

Their leaves make it."

Can you imagine if plants ate food like we do, like pizza?

Oh, no.

"To make food, plants need light, water, and air.

Leaves catch the sunlight, roots soak up the rain water, and little openings in the leaf let air in."

So here's the leaf kind of letting air in and growing and growing.

"Soon, broad, prickly leaves with jagged edges unfold on the stems."

So if you've ever been to a pumpkin patch, I have some homework for you.

Go up to where the leaves are and take one finger, and kind of rub it on the leaf.

You'll notice that it's kind of prickly."

The seed leaves dry up.

Now the new leaves make food for the pumpkin plant."

So here are the seeds drying up, making new way for the pumpkin plant.

"Each pumpkin stem has many sets of tubes.

One tube in each set takes water from the soil up to the leaves so they can make sugar.

The other tube in each set sends food back down so the pumpkin can grow."

Did you know that pumpkin plants were so complicated with tubes going up and down?

"The days grow warmer.

The farmer tends to the pumpkin patch to keep weeds out.

Weeds take water from the soil."

If you have any gardeners in your life, you know that you have to pluck the weeds so the other plants can grow.

"Pumpkin plants don't stand up tall.

As the stems grow longer, they sprawl all over the ground."

To sprawl means they grow this way, in all directions, all around.

They don't grow up.

"Soon flower buds appear on the vines.

After each bud open, it's orange petals grow bigger and bigger."

I wonder if they're orange or if they're yellow, They look both there.. "During the heat of the day, the flowers close up."

(Miss Lara slurps) "They open again during the cool nights and early mornings, and the bright orange flowers attach swarms of bees.

They attract them so the bees can fertilize other pumpkin plants.

The petals wither away where the flowers bloomed.

Tiny hard fruits begin to grow.

Hundreds of these cling to the vine."

Now what could those fruits be?

What do you think they are?

Hmm.

Are they the pumpkins?

"The days grow hot.

All summer, the warm sun and the cool rain help the tiny fruits grow larger and larger and larger until they become pumpkins.

Pumpkins change colors too," just like the leaves and the trees that we talked about.

As they ripen and grow, they change from green to yellow, then to orange.

In just four months, small flat white pumpkin seeds have grown into big fat orange pumpkins, and the pumpkins are ripe and round with lumps and bumps."

I don't see any rectangle ones there.

"Some pumpkins will be carved into jack-o-lanterns for Halloween.

Others will be baked into a delicious pumpkin pie."

Mm-hmm.

"Colorful leaves will turn brown.

Winter winds will begin to blow, and soon the trees are bare.

The farmer looks out over the pumpkin patch where only a few dead vines remain.

But when spring winds warm the earth again, he will plant hundreds of pumpkin seeds, and once again, they will grow from seed to pumpkin.

The end."

So what did we learn about pumpkins?

We learned that they grow over a period of four months, don't they?

They grow in what's called a cycle.

A cycle is something that repeats over and over again.

So for our foundational skill lesson, we're actually gonna talk about the pumpkin life cycle.

You have a life cycle too, just like a pumpkin.

You start off as a baby, then get into an adult.

So let's review the pumpkin life cycle together.

So the very first thing that we learned is that you plant the seed.

You plant the seed in the ground, right?

And you take the seed and plant it in there, and then that seed becomes a tiny sprout with two little leaves that poke up like this.

And then that sprout sprawls into a gigantic vine.

Now you'll remember the pumpkin leaves are kind of bristly, so I want you to go and feel one them.

So once we have from seed to sprout to vine, what happens next?

You'll notice on the vine that sprawled, little things are gonna start to appear.

They're flowers, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.

And they're yellow or orange flowers.

Those are the beginning of the pumpkin.

Once those flowers are there, they're gonna dry up and become little baby fruits that are green pumpkins.

Do you remember?

Pumpkins change color, just like the leaves on the trees.

So the green pumpkins become a big gigantic orange pumpkin, doesn't it?

And those are the pumpkins that we bake into pie, or we carve into jack-o-lanterns.

And from there, the pumpkins kind of wither and die.

Some farmers collect the seeds, and the cycle starts all over again.

So what do you think?

Do you wanna explore a pumpkin with me together?

Okay, let's go over to our project place, because we're gonna open up a pumpkin, take a look inside.

I'll show you other gourds, and then have a special activity that involves slime or oobleck.

So let's take a look together.

Here we go.

All right.

So I went to the pumpkin patch, and I picked out a pumpkin that I thought was pretty round.

Look it, what do you think?

Did I do good?

(Miss Lara laughs) I thought it was pretty round.

It only has one little spot here, where it's a little bit bruised.

But I thought we would open it up together so you can see what's on the inside.

What do you think that this pumpkin is gonna look like on the inside?

Do you think it's gonna be orange or white?

Let's take a look.

All right, let's see.

Okay, here's the stem.

Here you go.

Ooh.

It has these.

Do you remember what these are called from the book?

Those are our seeds.

That's right.

Look at how many seeds are in here.

I'll turn it over in a minute so you can see, and then I'm touching, it's kind of icky and sticky, with all these kind of strings hanging out of it and it smells, ooh, very fresh.

Let's see.

All right, I'm gonna show you the inside of the pumpkin right now.

Let's look.

Ooh, it's kind of in there and deep, and I'll dig my hand in so you can see it's sticky and ooey and gooey, and there's more seeds in there.

Now there are different kinds of pumpkins.

This is not the kind of pumpkin that you would use to make pumpkin pie.

The kinds of pumpkins you would use to make pumpkin pie that you find in the store are actually much smaller and they have different names.

They're called pie pumpkins or Cinderella pumpkins.

I have a little one here.

What do you think?

Do those pumpkins look the same?

No.

This one's rounder and taller, isn't it?

And, fleshier.

Look at.

This is the flesh of the pumpkin.

See how thick it is?

This one has a thinner flesh and it's squat.

It's kind of lower to the ground.

But these are the types of pumpkins that you can bake.

Also, if you go to the store, you might see what are called gourds this time of year.

And these come in all different shapes and sizes.

I wanted to show you a few of them.

Some of them are kind of scary, 'cause they have bumps and lumps, like you might find like on a witches nose, they say in a story.

So look at this one.

This one's yellow, and it's very rough and bumpy.

It's texture is lumpy, isn't it.

Look it.

Then I have another one here.

Look at the shape of this one.

Looks like it has a hook on the top, doesn't it?

(Miss Lara laughs) And there's still more I have over here.

Look at this.

Actually, it goes this way, but I thought it was really neat going this way.

It looks like a hand holding a circle, and it has green specks and yellow specks, and the stem is actually right here.

So it kind of looks like a melting pumpkin, melting gourd.

And then one last one that I'll show you, because you can really see the lumps and bumps on it, is this gourd.

Look at that.

Now, some people like to paint these all up, and that would be a great art activity that you can try.

So you'll notice the different textures and sizes, the different things that you might see.

While a pumpkin is smooth, a gourd is much rougher in texture, and is much smaller.

So I hope that I can bring you more pumpkins to share.

But right now I thought we would do a really fun activity with our pumpkin.

So you can see, I already asked a grownup or somebody with a very sharp knife to cut off the top, because what we're going to do is we're gonna make pumpkin oobleck.

Have you ever heard of oobleck?

Oobleck is like this slimy thing.

I have some right here, and we're gonna make it right inside of our pumpkins.

I'm gonna show you what it looks like first, before I tell you what materials you'll need.

Oobleck is this.

It's not quite as solid.

It's not quite a liquid.

It actually is very slimy, but has a very different kind of texture.

It's what's called a Neo-newtonian fluid, because it can be liquid and solid.

So to make this oobleck, you're going to need corn starch, which you can get at the grocery store, and some water.

And we're gonna mix it right inside of our pumpkin.

Now the first step that you're going to need is you're going to need to do is take all the seeds, and kind of scrape them away from your pumpkin.

Now, there's a couple of ways that you can do this.

You can actually take a spoon, and kind of scrape the inside.

You can use your hands, which is a lot of fun.

But one little tip I have for you, is if you have one of these in your kitchen, just kind of like a hand mixer, you can actually put it right in your pumpkin.

I'm gonna demonstrate how.

And turn it on, and swish it around, (mixer blending) and the pumpkin seeds will loosen up right from the edge rather quickly, so you don't have to scoop all of them away from the edge, and get kind of slimy.

So give that tip a try.

Right now, let's make our oobleck.

Okay, first ingredient is corn starch.

Now corn starch looks like flour, but it's not quite flour.

It's a white powdery substance that some people use for baking.

And it has a lot of other uses too.

We're gonna pack it in.

We're gonna need two cups of this.

So there's one cup.

And I know I have exactly two cups in here.

Now, why make it in the pumpkin?

Because then it's gonna mix with all the seeds and goo that we saw earlier.

It's gonna a create a really fun experience for us to try out, a sensory experience.

All right.

So, next I'm gonna need one cup of water.

So let me mix that in.

There's one cup of water.

And then, because I want my oobleck to be a little bit orange, you'll notice on the sample one I made that it was just a little bit orange, I'm actually gonna mix two colors together.

Can you guess which ones they are?

Yes, red and yellow.

They make orange.

So I'm gonna mix one drop of red.

Here we go.

One.

And one, maybe two drops of yellow.

The red is very overpowering sometimes.

Let's do two drops.

One, two.

Oh, and get it in now.

I'll show you what it looks like all inside really quickly.

That's what it's looking like, powdery.

And then, because I like to make things simple, I'm gonna use my hand mixer, and I'm gonna get in there and mix it all up.

Now, the good thing about having a such deep bowl is I won't make a huge mess.

(mixer blending) I'm gonna mix it up.

Mix, mix, mix it.

Let's get in there.

All right, it's coming together.

I can tell.

Here we go.

I'm gonna pull it out.

Ooh, it's gonna be a big slimy glob.

Ooh, I'm scared, it's like the guts of the pumpkin.

Here we go.

What do we think?

Ooh, it feels kinda sticky and slimy.

Look at this.

I wonder if you can add a scent to it.

So it already kind of smells like pumpkin, but if you wanted an additional sensory experience, you can actually add a little bit of cinnamon in here, just a little bit, maybe a little pumpkin pie spice, and it can be really, really smelly in a good way.

So here is our pumpkin oobleck, all the guts of the pumpkin all out.

(Miss Lara laughs) What do we think?

I hope that you get to try this activity at home.

Of course, it's a little bit messy, but so is having fun.

Always gotta get messy when you're having fun.

The hard part is getting all the seeds off, and really resisting the urge to take a little bite, because it does look kind of yummy.

All right.

So I'm gonna wipe my hands here, and then I'm gonna show you my book recommendation for the day.

So everybody loves Pete the Cat, and for the season, there's no shortage of books for Pete the Cat and other fun characters.

So for our book recommendation, I actually have "Pete the Cat, Five Little Pumpkins," right here to show you.

Now, this is a really fun book.

You can see all the pumpkins have the little hats.

And if you take a look inside, you'll see there's all kinds of fun characters for your child to explore like Frankenstein pumpkin.

Ooh, that's interesting.

And Pete the Cat on a bicycle.

So I hope that you check out this book.

It also has our "Five Little Pumpkin," song that we've been singing.

So just adds a few more characters.

I hope you check this one out on Sora or your local library.

All right, it looks like we have just enough time to sing kind of our long alphabet song, which is one of my favorites.

So, let me put my pumpkin here to the side and I will grab my alphabet card.

Are you ready to sing with me?

♪ A is for amazing, that's what you are ♪ ♪ B is for brave, that will carry you far ♪ ♪ C is for caring and community ♪ ♪ D is for determined to be the best you can be ♪ ♪ E is for empathy, caring for all ♪ ♪ F is for friends that'll catch you when you fall ♪ ♪ G is for grateful for everything around ♪ ♪ And H is for hopeful there's more good to be found ♪ ♪ I is for for imagine all the fun things we could do ♪ ♪ J is for joyful, how I feel when I'm with you ♪ ♪ K is for kind to people and animals too ♪ ♪ And L is for love, put it in all that you do ♪ ♪ M is for mindful, be present every day ♪ ♪ N is for nice words in everything you say ♪ ♪ O is for original, always be you ♪ ♪ And P is for persevere until you make it through ♪ ♪ Q is for quiet those bad thoughts ♪ ♪ R is for remember all the greatness that you've got ♪ ♪ S is for strong, body and mind ♪ ♪ And T is for talent, why not make yours being kind ♪ ♪ U is for unique, special in love ♪ ♪ V is for victorious, always rise above ♪ ♪ W's for worthy and wonderful too ♪ ♪ X, don't X out those mistakes ♪ ♪ They're what make you, you ♪ ♪ Y is for yes, for getting to the end of this rhyme ♪ ♪ And that's the alphabet, I'll Z you next time ♪ All right, boys and girls, I'll Z you next time.

Let me tell you what we're going to do tomorrow.

To do the activity tomorrow, you're going to need a black piece of construction paper, some Popsicle sticks, some red paint, some yellow paint, and some paper.

We're going to be making a five little pumpkins craft so that you can learn our song of the week.

We're also gonna be reading a story of "Spookley the Square Pumpkin."

A square pumpkin?

Now in our book, our pumpkin didn't have any edges, but in Spookley's case, he's different.

So I can't wait to share that book with you.

Until then, Miss Lara sends you a big smooch (Miss Lara blows a kiss) and a big squeeze.

We'll see you tomorrow, boys and girls.

Goodbye.

(upbeat bright music)