Fall is in full swing here at PME with pumpkins, crunchy leaves and... animals? Ok, so baby animals aren't typically a symbol of Fall, but we were very excited to see them and touch them when the pumpkin patch came to our school this week. Cows and sheep and goats and piglets and bunnies and chicks... oh my! We also loved that we got to pick our own pumpkins from the little "patch". A big "thank you" to everyone who made this happen for us! We spent the next couple of days doing all kinds of fun things with our pumpkins. In Science and Math, we compared and measured their height, circumference and weight with that of an apple. We also made hypotheses about which would roll fastest down a hill - the pumpkin or the apple? Most of us guessed the apple. We had some great ideas: because it's smoother, it's lighter, it doesn't have a big stem to get in the way... And since any good hypothesis must be tested, we took the pumpkin and apple to the hill at Spirit Square to race them down the hill. Unfortunately the apple kept getting stuck on things as it rolled down the hill so Mrs. A, our transition EA, had the great idea to try rolling them down the slides! We found that the metal slides were so ridiculously fast that it was hard to tell which one actually won. But Science is all about making adjustments so we moved our experiment one final time over to the small yellow slides. This seemed to be the perfect venue. And to our surprise, the pumpkin won every time! We asked some great questions about why that might have happened and we concluded that, just like how adults go faster down the water slides than kids, heavy things might roll faster down a hill than lighter things. We had so much fun with this experiment that Madame let us play with dropping the pumpkin and apple down other things as well, including the bumpy slide. Our final test was a "drop test". Which one would drop the fastest? At this point, we were already becoming experts at the whole "heavy" vs. "light" idea and the popular vote went to Team Pumpkin. Sure enough, when Madame dropped both the apple and the pumpkin from the same height, the pumpkin easily won the race to the ground. And bonus... it exploded and spilled its seeds all over the floor. A perfect opportunity to talk about pumpkin seeds and how they grow! And for the last "pièce de résistance" with our pumpkins, we created some melted crayon art using a heat gun and some of Madame's broken crayons. But it wasn't all pumpkins and apples this week. We also did lots of singing about being thankful and about our feelings, and continued our Math investigations about shapes by creating them with our bodies. And the week ended with Farmer Day! Madame found her twin... Mrs. Beveridge, our Vice Principal, even came and read us a farmer story! It was fun for us to get to know her a little better! Some other fun photos for your viewing pleasure... The bathtub is magnetic!
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