Pumpkin Unit Mega Bundle

You can purchase this MEGABUNDLE  at my TPT store HERE.

Or you can buy each item separately at my TPT store.  Click on the hyperlink to take you to each item at my store.

How a Pumpkin Grows (Life Cyle of a Pumpkin) Packet:

1. How a Pumpkin Grows Cut Apart Story: Students cut apart the story and piece it back together using the picture clues and what they know about how a pumpkin grows. Can be used as an assessment piece after reading the mini-book.
2. How a Pumpkin Grows Mini-Book: Easy reader with picture labels. Similar clip art pictures as the cut-apart story. Simply copy double-sided and have your copy machine staple on the left hand side. Cut in half with a paper cutter and add additional staples for reinforcement.
3. How a Pumpkin Grows Writing: Picture clues included in the picture box to the left. Handwriting lines included to keep your early learners organized as they write the sentence to match the picture.
4. Life Cycle of a Pumpkin Sequence Cards: Display in your pocket chart or on your bulletin board. Use at a center to have your students put back in order.

How to Carve a Pumpkin FREEBIE:

1. Step by step with picture clues on how to carve a pumpkin writing sheet.

Pumpkin Skip Counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s:

1. Pumpkin skip counting cards. Some pumkins are missing the numbers. Students will write the missing number before cutting the cards apart to have for a "put the cards in order" activity.
2. Write the skip counts on the 100 grid sheet.
3. Write the skip counts through the pumpkin patch sheets.

Pumpkin and Halloween Riddles:

1. This is a riddles game that you can play whole group during your fall pumpkins theme and before Halloween. Teacher reads the riddle as students are holding the answer cards (picture cards). They have to listen for the clues for their picture and then come up and answer the riddle by reading the card.

Pumpkins & Halloween Cut Apart Sentences:

1. A pumpkin is orange and round.
2. A pumpkin grows in a pumpkin patch.
3. We will have a pumpkin tasting in first grade.
4. Halloween is for trick-or-treating.

Fall, Pumpkins, and Halloween Word Wall Cards:

1. Fall: acorn, squirrel, apple, leaf, leaves, scarecrow, crow, rake, sunflower, corn, apple pie,
2. Pumpkins: pumpkin, seed, sprout, plant, vine, yellow pumpkin, green pumpkin, leaf, pumpkin muffin, pumpkin pie, pumpkin patch, jack-o-lantern, blossom, carve, stem, weigh, measure, paint, pumpkin harvest
3. Halloween: witch, pirate, skeleton, vampire, astronaut, frankenstein, ghost, spider, bat, gravestone, haunted house, candy corn, treat bucket, treat bag, kettle, cowgirl, cowboy, trick or treating

How to Carve a Pumpkin Cut-Apart Story:

1. Students put the simple story in order by cutting out the story parts and pasting them back in order.  Picture clues are provided to help young children do this on their own.

Pattern Block Pumpkins:

1. This is a step by step hands-on activity to do for your Pumpkins theme. Students create a Pattern Block Pumpkin using a Pattern Block Template or stencil, construction paper, and Pattern Blocks. A great way to combine an art project with your math activity.
2. Pocket chart direction cards for a visual for your students.
3. 1 page directions that can be posted as a learning target.

How a Pumpkin Grows Packet

Just finished this tonight.  Wanted a mini-book to match my new cut-apart story for "How a Pumpkin Grows" that I made last weekend...then I started adding to it and it bacame this new "How a Pumpkin Grows" packet I just put up for sale on TPT!  I am so excited to use this new stuff!

You can purchase this HERE at my TPT store.

Included: 

1. How a Pumpkin Grows Cut Apart Story:  Students cut apart the story and piece it back together using the picture clues and what they know about how a pumpkin grows.  Can be used as an assessment piece after reading the mini-book.

2. How a Pumpkin Grows Mini-Book:  Easy reader with picture labels.  Similar clip art pictures as the cut-apart story.  Simply copy double-sided and have your copy machine staple on the left hand side.  Cut in half with a paper cutter and add additional staples for reinforcement.

3. How a Pumpkin Grows Writing:  Picture clues included in the picture box to the left.  Handwriting lines included to keep your early learners organized as they write the sentence to match the picture.

4. Life Cycle of a Pumpkin Sequence Cards:  Display in your pocket chart or on your bulletin board.  Use at a center to have your students put back in order.

 

 

 

How To Make a Pumpkin Pie Writing FREEBIE

Wow!  Thanksgiving break is here.  YAY!!!!!  But where did November go?  What a jam-packed month.  So many fun activities and not enough time to do it all.  Well, we say good-bye to our Thanksgiving theme and move on to our North Pole-Christmas theme that starts next week.  One of the biggest projects we do is our Holiday Cookbook as a gift to our parents.  Students get to write a recipe in their own words on how they think their favorite food is made.  Each year is scares the you-know-what out of us as we start modeling the activity and have the kids think of the step by step process of making something.  It's like pulling teeth out or pulling your hair out stressful, but when its done, its amazingly cool.  And then you have this sense of accomplishment and think, "Oh, yeah.  It wasn't THAT bad."

This year I we tried to prep our kids a little bit during our Pumpkins theme by doing a "How to Carve a Pumpkin" writing.  You can pick up that FREEBIE at our TPT store HERE.  We modeled this with the whole class and then had the kids do it on their own.  It gave a pretty good picture of who is going to need the most in-depth help during the cookbook writing.

During our Thanksgiving theme, we came up with a "How to Make a Pumpkin Pie" writing activity.  Since there were SO many Thanksgiving activities to do in Novemer we didn't actually have the kids do the writing on their own for this one, but just did a class writing on the Mimio.  The students used the pictures to help them think about the steps for making a homemade pumpkin pie.  After we finished the class writing on the Mimio one of my students asked if we could find a video of someone making a pumpkin pie...so I jumped on that opportunity.  What a great way to check and see how accurate we were at writing the steps (since I've never in my life made a homemade pumpkin pie).  As we watched the video, I would pause every so often for students to check back and see if we were right.  They thought this was pretty neat.

So...next week when we start the dreaded Holiday Cookbook, I am hoping my students are a little big more prepared....and that I'm not pulling my hair out.

Grab your FREEBIE "How to Make a Pumpkin Pie" writing activity HERE at our TPT store.  We would love your feedback.  Thanks for stopping into our blog...and hope you all have a very Happy Thanksgiving!

FREEBIE: How to Carve a Pumpkin Writing

Did this fun little writing activity before we actually cut open our pumpkin today.  The kids did a GREAT job!  Using our Mimio projector to display the sheet and write on it, we talked through the pictures and wrote as a class how to carve a pumpkin.  I closed the Mimio and then had the kids do it in their own words!  What a blast!  The visuals truly helped those kids think step by step.  Hoping this is a good preparation for our Holiday Cookbook writing activity that we will do in about a month, where they have to write a step by step recipe of their favorite food.  Here is a FREEBIE of the sheet that I put together:

Either click on the JPG and print the JPG image from the blog or go to our TPT store HERE to pick up this freebie!  We would appreciate your feedback.  Hope you can squeeze this in before Halloween!

 

~Carrie

Pumpkin Skip Counting by 2s, 5s, 10s

 

 

One of the hardest things to teach first graders is skip counting.  I started making this activity just for counting by 2s, but Christine gave me the idea to make it include counting by 5s and 10s as well.  It seems like we always have students on an intervention for skip counting and they need all the practice they can get.  We have done the skip counting cut apart cards for a few years where they cut apart the pumpkin cards with counts by 2 on them and then scramble them up and put them back in order.  I thought it would be a good idea to make some 100 grids to go along with this so they would have to write the counts by 2 and see the number grid pattern.  As a final activity I included the writing the skip counting through the pumpkin patch to use as an assessment.

 

You can find this activity at our TPT store HERE.

 

 

 

 

Pumpkins & Halloween Riddles

Just finished our Pumpkins and Halloween Riddles that we will use at the end of our Pumpkin theme, which is the week of Halloween. All the stages of the life cycle of the pumpkin are included, as well as what you can do with the pumpkin after it is picked (jack-o-lantern, pumpkin muffin, pumpkin pie).

You can find this at our TPT store HERE.

We would love your feedback!

Pattern Block Pumpkins

Today after school Christine, Sara, and I planned our first week of our Pumpkins theme, which starts next week.  One of our favorite activities to do the very first week of the theme is one called Pattern Block Pumpkins.  We usually hang these finished projects on our doors or outside our classroom doors to decorate for the theme. 

 

We've found that over the years, students need more and more visuals to help them complete tasks, so last year we put together some step by step directions for the pocket chart so that students can follow the pictures and simple directions to complete each step of the project.  We also made a one-pager to post as the "learning target".

 

HERE is the Pattern Block Pumpkins activity that you can find at our TPT store:

 

Thanks for stopping into our blog.  We would love your feedback, so leave us a comment!

Pumpkins and Halloween Cut Apart Sentences

One of the things that we do for writing each week is a theme related cut apart sentence.  This year we decided to revamp our cut-apart sentences to include a place for the students to glue the words and provide handwriting lines to write the sentence on.  This has helped our first graders so much in organizing and ordering their sentence. 

Here is a thumb of the four sentences pack that you can purchase at our TPT store HERE:

 

We have also started creating Mimio interactive lessons using these cut apart sentences...and today they thought it was SOOOOO much fun.  When I get my pictures downloaded from my camera, I will try to blog about how we've created an interactive Mimio (smartboard) lesson to go along with our theme cut-apart sentences.

Fall, Pumpkins, Halloween Word Wall Cards

Looking ahead to our next theme, we decided we wanted to revamp our word wall cards so they weren't in D'Nealian.  We switched to Zaner Bloser this year and all our word wall cards are in D'Nealian, so that just means a little more work on our part.  I think it will pay off during journal writing time when we would have to have the first graders erase and make their letters the right size and shape and not copy the D'Nealian letters on our old cards. 

This set includes word wall cards for your fall themes: fall, pumpkins, and Halloween.

• Fall: acorn, squirrel, apple, leaf, leaves, scarecrow, crow, rake, sunflower, corn, apple pie,
• Pumpkins: pumpkin, seed, sprout, plant, vine, yellow pumpkin, green pumpkin, leaf, pumpkin muffin, pumpkin pie, pumpkin patch, jack-o-lantern, blossom, carve, stem, weigh, measure, paint, pumpkin harvest
• Halloween: witch, pirate, skeleton, vampire, astronaut, frankenstein, ghost, spider, bat, gravestone, haunted house, candy corn, treat bucket, treat bag, kettle, cowgirl, cowboy, trick or treating

You can find this set HERE at our TPT store.