Happy Halloween Week!

 

We didn't get much school work done this week, because we focused more on fun family activities. That was okay with me, and definitely okay with the kiddos :) We did do some undercover learning though!

We started the week off by doing our pumpkin seed experiment (you can find the chart we used on my printables page). The kids were really into tapping on the pumpkins, and examining them to see if they could guess which one had the most. Boy were we way off! Bunny guessed that there was 1 seed in the big and small pumpkins, and 11 in the middle one. Raymond guessed 50, 60, and 100, respectively. Boo Boo guessed 100 for all of them.

I scooped each pumpkins guts out, one by one. As soon as I would scoop them out the kids would sort through it to put the seeds in a bowl. Thankfully, I put down a cheap table cloth I picked up at the dollar store. Bunny touched the pumpkin guts once, decided it was gross, and watched a movie until we were done.

The results were pretty close. The small pumpkin had 432 seeds, the middle had 307, and the big one had 480. We found out that size sort of matters, the bigger the pumpkin the more seeds it'll have, but most are not mature enough. The small pumpkin had no immature seeds, whereas the large one had a ton of them. We only counted the ones we could eat.

The fruit of our hard labor... lots of yummy roasted pumpkin seeds!

When we were done with the seed experiment, I took the smallest pumpkin, cut it up and put it in the refrigerator. The next day we baked it in the oven, scooped out the cooked pumpkin and pureed it. Yummy, pumpkin puree! That little pumpkin made a ton of puree, which was refrigerated again (so we could drain off any excess water that would rise).

After portioning the puree out, we ended up with 2 home baked pumpkin pies, and enough for 2 more  placed in our freezer. The kids have loved our pumpkin week!

Right before football practice, we took our butterflies to the park to be released. That was a ton of fun, but somewhat sad. 4 out of 5 of our butterflies survived. The first one out of it's cocoon didn't fully develop it's wings. Raymond nicknamed it Butter, because it was all butter, and no fly.

Each of the kids took turns taking out a butterfly and releasing it. These are my favorite pictures of the week.

The last thing we did this week, was carve our pumpkin. Daddy did it, and the kids picked the template. We love our spooky pumpkin :) The kids can't wait to go trick-or-treating tomorrow night, so Have a Safe & Happy Halloween everyone!