OHC - Pumpkins

We didn't have to travel far to get this Outdoor Hour Challenge done! This year we grew our very own pumpkins. 

The great thing about doing this is that we were able to observe each stage, from nurturing that little seed in the early spring, to planting outdoors and watching it ramble, grow, flower, and fruit.

We recalled each characteristic of our pumpkins as we read through The Handbook of Nature Studies lesson on pumpkins. When we got tot he part that describes the rather prickly stems, one of the girls recalled how she had stepped barefoot on the stalk while washing the car. Ouch! That's personal experience for you!

Once we had done a bit of reading and chatting, we brought in 3 of our pumpkins, harvested only a few weeks ago, and set them out on the kitchen counter. We cut one in half so that we could observe the inside of the fruit as described in the Handbook of Nature.

Our study ended up becoming a bit of unit study of sorts, when you have an open pumpkin you simply cannot just leave it at that! You have to cook it too! 

We scraped out the seeds and set about to toasting them - a favourite autumn snack of ours!

We also roasted our pumpkin and turned it into Roast Pumpkin Soup - now in the freezer and waiting to be eaten up on Bonfire Night!

We used our pumpkins to do an art project - I had pinned this great tutorial onto my 'Homeschool Art Ideas' Pinterest board a few months ago. So we drew light outlines of our pumpkins onto water colour paper, then went over the lines with glue.

Once the glue had dried, we used a black fine-liner to trace around out glue lines and then filled in with water-color. 

We love the results :o)