Positively Learning: It All Started With a Pumpkin...

Pumpkins arrived at my local grocery store!

I immediately picked up a couple bags. I placed one pumpkin on my office desk (just because) & also brought 2 into the classrooms I "push into" (inclusion).

You would NOT believe how excited 6 year olds
are about a mini-pumpkin!

I discovered this week that a single pumpkin can...

* Encourage a 1st grader to sit still for 10 more minutes with the hopes of just touching the pumpkin

* Motivate a budding writer to add sensory details to his or her writing (more on this in a bit!)

* "watch" a small group of students when their special educator needed to grab something from across the classroom (yup, the pumpkin "watched" them for me, was that wrong?!?)

These pumpkins have magical powers ;)

So besides being a wonderful classroom management aide, these pumpkins also helped my students in Writer's Workshop. This week, we discussed adding sensory details to make our writing more interesting. I worked with a small group of emerging writers who benefit from extra modeling and support with writing. Together, we reviewed the five senses with a quick picture sort...

then we moved onto exploring descriptive words...

then it was back to the "round, smooth, beautiful, stinky, quiet, orange" pumpkin (their words, not mine).

Here's themed stationary to explore pumpkins in your classroom: