So I made a Jack-o-lantern with a big funny face

We welcomed Pooja who came to teach our class with Hisami and Liezel because Shelley had to go to a meeting at another school. We loved having her in our classroom and look forward to seeing her tomorrow. She played with us in the dress up corner, chatted to us while we drew in the office and she read stories to us. This morning was our “Pumpkin carving day”. It was so much fun. We had already requested triangle eyes, a triangle nose and a funny shaped mouth; and then Daiki said that he wanted to have circular shaped ears. So we watched while Shelley cut the top of the pumpkin off…….Daiki helped pull the top off and …….what was inside?

We saw seeds and some stringy orange bits of pumpkin. We scraped and scraped until we had taken all of the seeds out and most of the stringy bits; and then we started carving. You can see the triangular shaped for the eyes and nose. So that is where we started. First we cut out the eyes, then the mouth, then the nose and lastly the ears. You can see how hard it was because Shelley was concentrating and we were watching eagerly and with much curiosity. Eventually she said: “Okay let’s push out the eye” and we did.

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She did the same for the other eye and in the end we had an awesome looking Jack-o-lantern.  We sang while we were carving “Did you ever see a pumpkin” and then when we had made it, we sang “So I made a Jack-o-lantern”. Liezel found a tiny red candle which we put inside with the flame burning and then we put the lid on top. It made a shiny eerie atmosphere in the classroom and when we switched off the lights, it was so exciting. The eyes, nose, mouth and ears looked like there was a light behind them. We took this photo of the Jack-o-lantern. And you can also see the pumpkin seeds roasting in the pan. We were curious and some of us took magnifying glasses to see what they would look like if they were big.

They were so delicious when they were fully roasted. We ate them at snack time and when we woke up after nap time. And if our teachers hadn’t taken the container away, we would have eaten them all up; we loved the crunchy feeling and the salty taste. We had to be really careful when the pumpkin seeds were roasting because the pot became really hot; and we discussed how we need to take care because we can burn if we touch pots when they are hot. We actually continued this discussion later in the day, when we looked at the Jack-o-lantern and saw that there was a brown mark on the lid. How did the lid get a brown mark? We looked at the pumpkin and thought about it. We looked right inside the pumpkin and saw that the red candle had melted. Maybe when the candle had a big flame, the flame became so big, it reached up and touched the lid and burnt it. Oh, we said, so that’s what will happen to us if we touch the candle when it is burning. It made us think really hard about candles, flames, fire, hot and then getting an “ouchie”. Most of us don’t like “ouchies”.

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When we sat on the mat and we sang our good morning song and then we looked for our names and placed them on the board to say “I am here today”. We listed to Pooja reading “The Little Gorilla” to us. We loved looking at her face as she read the story, because she has great facial expressions. Later in the morning we did some stamping, using the Halloween shapes that our teachers carved out in sweet potatoes.

We realized that the sweet potato needs to be moist and the paint not too thick, in order for the shapes to stamp clearly on our page. We had a wonderful time in the park with our Buds Class friends. They like to come up to us and hug us. There is so much to write up about our day today. Thanks for the fun day and see you tomorrow. We are missing our friend Alexa and hope that she will be better by tomorrow.

Love all the children in Petals Class

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