Life Cycle of a Pumpkin

Collaboration, working together, creating, and sharing are all valuable steps of the project based learning process.  We have been learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin.  We have read several books and talked in depth about the cycle.  We have created our own cycles but when we brain stormed as a class on how we can share this project to others the students came up with something spectacular.  They decided they wanted to make LARGE posters to share with other students in the school.  One of the ideas was to gather everyone in the gym to teach everyone all at once.  Another idea was to go classroom to classroom to teach about the life cycle.  Making a life cycle on our bulletin  board, and posters were ideas.  We decided the posters would work best for this project.

We needed first to learn what it meant to work together as a team.  We made several references to football and how players have to pass the ball, listen to their coaches, follow directions, and work together.  We made the connection that we needed to talk about a plan first and how were were going to make a poster to teach someone about an individual stage of the life cycle.

Below you can see students talking about their step of the life cycle.  They had to first plan what they were going to draw. 

Next, students got a large piece of paper.  They were instructed to continue talking about their plan but now they needed to in-vision it on paper.  They needed to talk together about how the wanted the orientation of their paper to be, where they were going to start drawing, colors they needed to use etc...

Then students found a book where they could gain ideas on how to draw their specific part of the life cycle.  You can see that below Kristen and Brady are intently looking at the leaves and vines of the pumpkin plant. 

Then the students began to draw, and illustrate their step of the life cycle.

Finally when our posters were complete, each group shared with our classroom.  We plan to visit other classrooms to share our life cycle with them. 

Pumpkin seed in the ground. 

Sprouts begin to grow...

leaves and a vine begin to grow...

yellow flowers begin to bloom and small pumpkins can be seen under the yellow flower if they have been pollinated by bees...

Green pumpkins begin to grow on the vine.  

You can still see some yellow flowers on the vines though...

Finally, the green pumpkins turn orange and the vine turns into the 

stem once it is picked from the vine. 

We hope to share our love and knowledge about pumpkins with other students in our school.  The students have been asking questions about large pumpkins, pumpkin shows, how people get their large pumpkins to the pumpkin shows, and what people do with them after pumpkin shows.  

We will check in later in the week to see what we have discovered about

 LARGE pumpkins and pumpkin shows.  

Mrs. Atkin