Fun on Friday: Pumpkin Life Cycle and Acrostic Poems

We had a shortened school time on Friday because my mom and my Granny Jan were coming down to visit for the afternoon. Instead of doing Science and History, we did some fun Halloween activities instead. We started by reading the book Big Pumpkin by Erica Silverman. It's a really cute book about a witch who wants to grow a pumpkin to make pumpkin pie on Halloween. She plants a pumpkin and it grows and grows and it gets so big that she can't pull it off the vine. All the other Halloween creatures come over to help her try to get the pumpkin off the vine. The rhyme is good, and the story is fun.

Then we talked about the life cycle of a pumpkin seed. We painted paper plates orange. And colored these pictures that had the four stages of a pumpkin. We cut out the pictures, and glued them onto our plates, to make pumpkins. When they were dry we hung them in the window of the back door. I think they add nicely to our Halloween decor.

Lastly we made pumpkin acrostic poems. I explained what an acrostic poem was first. Then on a scrap paper we thought up all the words we could think of that might be usable in our poem, that started with the letters in PUMPKIN.Then I wrote two poems as an example. Then I supervised Lincoln and Ivan write their poems. They did them pretty much all by themselves. All I had to do was help them keep things short, and to remind them that they needed to start each line with the correct letter. They put the words together on their own, using our brainstorming scratch paper. Here are our poems. Mine and Adelia's are the two example poems I wrote. And then Lincoln's and Ivan's. I was pleased with how well they did.

I rock at first-grade poetry, ya? ;)