(cheerful music) - Hello little learners welcome back to our pre K and TK classroom.

I'm your teacher today Misses Lara.

So nice to have you here this morning or whenever you're watching.

Can you tell me your name?

'Cause I like to try to guess your special letter.

Let's see.

Oh I think I got your special letter this time, let's see I'm going to make a big line straight down the middle.

A little line up top, hopefully it stays.

And then another little line, let's see.

What letter have I made?

I.

Is that your special letter?

Oh I see some of you saying yes and some of you are saying no.

Remember your special letter is the first letter of your name.

And if I don't have it yet I will soon don't you worry.

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

So I'm gonna add another magnet to my 10 frame.

Let's see, where should I add it here.

So let's see, one, two, three, four, five.

I have two on top and three on the bottom.

And two and three together make five.

And this week we're learning all about pumpkins because it is the month of October.

And in October you might seeing jack-o'-lanterns pop up on front porches around you or at the store they'll have big boxes of pumpkins that you might wanna dive into.

At least I do when I see there, they're hard and round you don't wanna do that.

And you might start seeing pumpkins in a pumpkin patch maybe if you go and visit.

So I hope that you loved learning about pumpkins this week.

For the last time we're gonna do our five little pumpkin song.

So you're gonna need your fingers, one, two, three, four, five and a gate.

And we're gonna put our five pumpkins on top.

Are you ready to do our finger player song?

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

The second one said "there are riches in the air."

The third one said "but we don't care."

The fourth one said "let's run and run and run."

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

Ready for a spooky sound.

Oh went the wind and out (Lara claps hands) went the light.

And the five little pumpkins rolled and rolled and rolled out of sight.

I wonder where the pumpkins went?

The rolling of the pumpkins reminds me of "Spookley" that book we read huh, where the pumpkins rolled down to the fence and spookily (bell dinging) saved the day.

Oh looks like it's time for our letter.

And another book that we're gonna read together, so let's see what clues our letter gives us.

Dear miss Lara, notice they started on the left and slid over to the right, that's called tracking and you use your pointer finger which is the one next to your thumb.

So when I read books I read left to right, left to right, left to right.

When I read books I read left to right that's how I become a strong reader.

Dear miss Lara I am a fierce yellow pumpkin!

Fierce, that means strong.

Oh almost a little bit scary.

Ho, ho, ho!

He, he, he!

You will run when you see me!

Oh no!

I wonder if we're gonna read a book about a scary pumpkin that's gonna try to make us run away.

Read about me if you dare!

That sounds like a challenge.

No book is gonna scare us right?

Let's see what book we're going to read.

It is called "The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin" by Margaret Wise Brown.

Pictures by Richard Egielski.

So remember the author who's Margaret Wise Brown she wrote the words, and the illustrator drew the pictures.

Look at the pictures!

Can you tell what the story is gonna be about?

I can see the grin of the jack-o'-lantern curling up.

Oh I hope it's not scary.

But there's a crow in the very first page that has a button.

Let's see.

What this book is gonna be about.

There was once a small pumpkin in a great big field.

A very small green pumpkin the size of an apple.

The fierce sun burned down on the little pumpkin and he grew and grew.

And pretty soon there was a fat little round little yellow little pumpkin in a great big field.

So look there's the green pumpkin.

Can you see who's next to the green pumpkin?

It's mice.

Oh I wonder if they're gonna be characters in our story.

Now this fat little round little yellow little pumpkin grew so fat and full of himself that he began to think he was a very firece vegetable as fierce as the sun that warmed his fat round sides.

Ho, ho, ho he would say.

When I grow up I will scare the field mice out of the field like the scarecrow does.

The little pumpkin would dearly have loved to make a fierce ferocious gobble gobble face like the scarecrows at the far end of the field, but try as he would his own pumpkin face stayed smooth and yellow and shiny.

So there he is.

Now the pumpkin doesn't have a fierce face.

And does it look like the mice are running away?

No, look at this one's even leaning on him.

Not a very scary pumpkin.

Then one day the sun did not shine as hot as fire and black birds filled the skies.

They began flying over the big field.

There was a burning smell in the air of leaves and crisp tingle and tickle that fat pumpkin sides.

There were so many birds in the sky that the scarecrow was busy from before daylight until after daylight chasing the birds out of his field.

And look at all those birds, and there's the scarecrow.

He's trying to chase all those birds away.

He's super busy.

I don't think he's doing a very good job.

His gobble gobble face became drippy and dreadful blew and blew.

Oh!

Do his hair.

He lost one scarecrow eye!

The old scarecrow knew that if there was anything that black bird is scare of it is a one eyed scarecrow.

There he is losing his eye and all these birds all around him.

But then that night and the night after something began to happen.

The first cool frost came into the night and the fat little round little yellow little pumpkin woke up one morning and discovered that he was a fiery orange yellow pumpkin.

The color of the sun.

A fierce burning color.

Oh there's the mouse and actually you look at his face he looks a little worried.

Now take a look at this picture.

You see the scarecrow with one eye there and there's some children playing in the background and there is our pumpkin.

I wonder what those children are going to do with the pumpkin, let's see.

Then three little children came galloping through the big field past the old one eyed scarecrow.

They ran right up to the fat little round little orange little pumpkin and the little girl called out "here he is, here's our terrible pumpkin!"

Oh I wonder.

So they cut the pumpkins heavy stem with a little saw knife.

Each taking turns they carried the pumpkin home across the field to their house.

The little pumpkin liked that.

'Cause remember he wanted to be scary.

And then with the little saw knife they hollowed him out all empty inside, sweet smelling and clean as a whistle.

Then they cut one big round eye into the side of his face, a big round hole, and the little pumpkin liked that whole hole out the pumpkin.

The fierce yellow pumpkin, I'm a one eyed pumpkin for sure.

Now here's something you might do with your family is carve a pumpkin.

And there they are still carving the pumpkin.

They carved a nice eye out of him.

Nice nose and nice mouth.

Ho, ho, laughed the pumpkin the fierce yellow pumpkin.

I'm a fierce yellow pumpkin for sure.

Mice will run when they see me.

He was certainly a fierce and ferocious pumpkin with a terrific terrible face.

After a while it was night, there was black darkness all around.

Inky black darkness.

The children came in with a lighted candle and stuck it inside the pumpkin so that the light shined out of his big round eyes and his triangle nose.

It was a horrible sight to see.

Are you ready to see it?

Whoa, look at that.

That didn't scare me, does it scare you?

(Misses Lara laughs) Maybe a little bit scary.

Smile through the fear.

(misses Lara laughs) And the children danced about him singing the song to the terrific terrible pumpkin with a zig zag grin.

There's the children dancing laughing.

And the little pumpkin was fierce and happy and he's saying, ho, ho, ho, he, he, he mice will run when they see me.

Look at that poor mouse is so scared.

And the mice did.

(Misses Lara laughs) So wasn't that a cute story about a little pumpkin that grew up to be a big ferocious fierce pumpkin after he became a jack-o'-lantern?

Maybe you have one of these at your house.

Now I wanted to point out that the author Margaret Wise Brown is also the author of another book called "Goodnight Moon".

That might be one that you know.

So if you like that book "Goodnight Moon" you'll like this one too.

Check out her other books as well.

Now it is Friday.

On Friday's we do a little shared writing.

So we're gonna go over to our writing board and we're gonna write down all the things we learned about pumpkins this week.

So let's walk over.

I wonder what we're going to include.

So look at our board, it says pumpkins with a special letter P. Now I want you to think back to all the things we learned about pumpkins.

Where do pumpkins come from?

Do you remember?

First they're a tiny little seed.

So let's put our seed right here.

If I was drawing a seed, I know it's kind of like this and round like this, just like a pumpkin seed.

Now they sell pumpkin seeds at the grocery store in bags and people like to eat them all when they're dried up maybe with a little salt.

This is what a seed might look like.

If you're wanting to follow along with me get a piece of paper and a pencil because right now we're gonna writ the word seed together.

So S that's an S, start at the top.

See.

And the last sound D, that's D. That's what a pumpkin is it's a seed.

Now pumpkins can turn into many things.

What's one thing that you remember a pumpkin can turn into?

That's right, a pie!

Yes let's write pie.

But first let's draw our pie.

So this is our pie.

Now I like whipped cream on my pie, so I'm gonna add a little dollop of whipped cream here.

We're gonna draw some pie.

Here's our pie, our pumpkin pie.

Now let's write the word pie, are you ready?

Special letter P. I.

And E. A pumpkin can be a pie.

Pumpkins can also be jack-o'-lanterns like our fierce yellow pumpkin.

So we're gonna draw a jack-o'-lantern here.

Now the little trick to drawing pumpkins, are you ready to see it?

First you draw an oval like this and then you draw another half oval and then another one like this.

And then it's a pumpkin, see?

You have to add a little stem to make a jack-o'-lantern we need his triangle eyes.

How should our jack-o'-lantern feel?

I think fierce.

And then we'll draw like a little bit here.

A little mouth.

But you can draw your jack-o'-lantern however you'd like.

Mine's a little snaggle tooth jack-o'-lantern.

Now let's write the word jack-o'-lantern, J.

A. C. K. O. L, A, N. T, E. R, N. jack-o'-lantern.

Now what else did we learn about pumpkins this week?

Hmm, how about oh there's a yellow flower and they wither away and that becomes a green pumpkin.

So we will draw a yellow flower and a green pumpkin.

There there's a flower and it withers away and becomes a little green pumpkin, which I'll draw right here.

That's part of the lifecycle of the pumpkin isn't it?

So maybe we'll write the word lifecycle.

Oh.

I. F. E. Life.

Cycle.

Lifecycle of a pumpkin.

So look we learned so many things about pumpkins didn't we?

Oh many more than I can include here.

But right now we're running out of time so I'm gonna get over to our project place because we need to finish out our week with a very special project.

So I wonder how many steps it's going to take me to get over there?

Do you think more than five or less than five?

I think more than five, I think seven.

Let's see.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Oh, less than five, only four.

Maybe I need to take smaller steps next time.

So we're gonna be making, this is not quite done yet, we're gonna be making a pumpkin kind of finger play tool.

And I'll show you the poem as soon as we finish, but it's gonna kinda look like this at the end.

So what you'll need for this activity is some light paper.

Now my paper is called cardstock, it's a little bit heavier but you can use any paper that you have on hand.

Some green paper for the stem.

We're gonna need scissors and a pencil and a Popsicle stick and glue stick and some black paper.

And then if you wanna make yours extra fancy I used a little bit of orange paint and some sponges 'cause we're gonna sponge on some orange to give it some texture.

So we'll star there.

First thing you're going to do is you're going to stack your white pieces of paper on top of each other like this.

So see?

And then you're gonna draw a pumpkin outline.

That means just the outer edges of a pumpkin.

So let's see and now I'm gonna make my pumpkin big and round.

That means it's not gonna have any edges.

So we're gonna start here, go around, and then we're gonna come back up like this.

See mine is I know that it's hard to see the pencil mark, but then you're gonna take your scissors and you're actually gonna cut out that pumpkin shape all the way around.

This is what's called an organic shape.

An organic shape doesn't really have any edges and it doesn't have a real form that you recognize.

Like this could be an oval, it could be a rectangle, kind of in between.

So here we are.

I'm gonna actually cut down a little here.

Now round and around and around using my helper hand.

Save the scraps for another project, because we love to recycle.

And this is kind of like what my pumpkin is looking like so far.

So for the next part you're actually going to need to glue these two pieces together.

So I'm gonna take my glue stick.

You can use regular glue, liquid glue if you like as well.

And let's see.

Now glue it all down.

Like this.

And when you hear the poem you'll understand why it needs to have two sides.

Gonna glue it down like this.

Make sure they're kind of even on top of each other so it kind of looks like one big pumpkin.

There you go.

Now before the two sides dry you're gonna wanna put a little stem in there.

The stem is what attaches the pumpkin to the vine.

So I'm gonna cut out a little stem out of my green paper like this.

Okay let's see, does that look like a stem?

Looks like it's on top.

Then I'm gonna stick it in between the two pieces of paper right before it dries.

And I might just add a little more glue to make sure that it sticks on there.

All right, glue to the edges like this to make sure that it sticks.

And then I'm gonna add another little piece of vine with the green paper in there.

There's the stem.

And I'm gonna make it curl out like this.

So here is my paper.

I'm just gonna take a little piece like this and then cut it and curl it up, let's see.

Cut around and around.

Like this.

And curl it in.

And you can cut your vine however you'd like, this is just how I cut mine.

And I think it just adds a little special touch as if the pumpkin had hair.

All right and add a little more glue.

Put that in there.

And the next step, okay there's our vine.

See it's looking like a little vine that's sticking out of it.

The next step is we're gonna add a jack-o'-lantern face.

And we're gonna do it to just one side.

So for that you're gonna need some black paper.

Now we're also gonna be painting our pumpkin orange, we're gonna sponge on the paint.

I chose not to do that first because of the time I have with you.

But since you have a lot of time at home you may wanna sponge paint your pumpkin first and then add your jack-o'-lantern face.

Now I'm gonna do it a little opposite today so you can see the finished product.

So I'm gonna cut out some eyes, I'm gonna make some triangle eyes.

Now triangle is the shape that has three sides, it looks like a thorn or a pointy piece like this.

I'm gonna add them to my pumpkin.

All right let's see.

Glue them on.

Two eyes here.

We need a nose and we need a mouth.

Almost there with the nose.

Another smaller triangle.

And then I'm going to cut out a mouth, oops like this.

Cut out a mouth here out of my larger piece of black paper.

All the way down.

So I'm gonna cut out like a crescent or like the letter D like this.

Then I'm gonna cut down like this.

Then maybe I'll cut out a teeth.

Make it really fierce here.

Cut out teeth like this.

So you just cut out a notch like that.

Maybe another one over here.

And maybe one in the middle.

So look there's our mouth.

I'm gonna glut it on so you can see what it's going to look like.

All right, here we go.

Now remember if I go too fast for you you can always watch our videos on the valley PBS website and also check 'em out on YouTube.

If you pause them so that you can see and go at your own rate.

Okay so here's our jack-o'-lantern.

Now the next step we're gonna need to do is actually stick a Popsicle stick in between here.

I'm gonna add just a little bit of glue again to the Popsicle stick.

Kind of stays in on its own but I like to add a little more glue.

And then.

Here's one.

Here's what's gonna look like.

Here's one that's kind of already done that I'm going to use.

And so we're gonna sponge paint it orange and then I'll tell you the poem, it's pretty fun.

I used to love doing this activity with my class.

And then when they would leave they would go up and they would say the poem to anyone that would wanna hear them.

They would just laugh and laugh.

So all right here's my sponge and my paint.

So I have the fancy sponge thing that I bought at the place where everything costs a dollar.

But you can actually just use a little piece of household sponge that used to wash the dishes or your fingers if you don't mind getting messy like I do.

So we're gonna sponge paint our pumpkin.

Going up and down.

And again if you wanted to do this part you could do this part first before adding your jack-o'-lantern face.

But because of time I wanted to make sure that I had my face on there so you could see the finished product.

Okay gonna sponge sponge sponge keep sponging.

You'll see that I can go pretty quickly, but you may want to take your time getting all the edges and nooks and cranny's of the pumpkin.

I'll put it this way so you can see a little bit.

Here we go.

All the way around.

Now you don't wanna get it too thick because then it will not dry fast, you'll have to wait and wait and wait.

And waiting is no fun.

Okay there's one side of the pumpkin now I'm gonna do the other side.

I'm just gonna put this here and we're gonna do the other side of the pumpkin really quickly so I can tell you my poem.

Quick quick quick.

Get through the sponging miss Lara.

What I like about sponge painting is it leaves the texture.

So if you look at it up close you can really see you know the texture so it looks almost like a rough pumpkin.

All right, here is our finished project.

Look at this.

I'll leave this over here.

Here it is, this is what it looks like.

You ready for the poem?

It goes like this.

Pumpkin pumpkin round and fat.

Turn into a jack-o'-lantern just like that.

(miss Lara laughs) What do you think?

You can try that with people.

Say hey check out my pumpkin round and fat.

Turn into a jack-o'-lantern just like that.

(Miss Lara laughs) So I hope that you give this project a try, it really is a fun one.

And it really reinforces rhyming skills too because that and that rhyme of course.

So give that one a try, I hope you enjoy it.

Before you leave I have another book recommendation I think I mentioned earlier in the week.

"Pete the Cat and the Five Little Pumpkins".

But I wanted to mention that this book has a song that goes with it.

So if you check online you can check out the song of "Pete the Cat and the Five Little Pumpkins".

I hope that you enjoy learning about pumpkins.

Until next week boys and girls.

Replay and use your imagination every single day.

Miss Lara sends you a big smooth.

Goodbye.

(cheerful music)