From pumpkins to decomposers to landfills on Tuesday

What a brilliant day of thinking we had today, it all began with a pumpkin.  Ever wonder where the word pumpkin came from?  Have a look:  http://www.kitchenproject.com/history/Pumpkin/

I asked everybody to make inferences about why I'd brought in a pumpkin.  The ideas ranged from carving to healthy snacks to watching it decompose.  All inferences were correct because these brilliant thinkers were connecting to all of our classroom conversations and their background knowledge.  We are going to carry out a decomposition experiment on this pumpkin using 3 different materials (water, soil and vegetable oil).  There will be a test jar with only the pumpkin itself and no other additive.  We made predictions about which jar will decompose first.  Can you make a predication?

We made a text to text connection back to a time lapse video we had watched on decomposing fruit and inferenced that because this is a sugar pumpkin that the decomposition process might be faster because we noticed that in the video that sugary fruit such as strawberries were the first to decompose.  We will be taking notes and tracking the changes of the decomposition jars so stayed tuned for our updates.

We also talked about all the other curriculum connections we can use the pumpkin for.  Like:  math and measurement.  How much does the pumpkin weigh?  How big should we make the pumpkin slices for the decomposition jars?  We can also estimate how many seeds we will find on the inside.  We connected to health and decided we could make healthy snacks by roasting the seeds.  Also perhaps make a lovely pumpkin pie.  We get creative and carve something artistic on the shell.  The possibilities are endless.

We discovered a new decomposer called Armadillidae a.k.a.  the pill bug.  When you look at the scientific name can you make a connection back to another animal?  Here is a link to a fact page to learn more about this important member of the brown food chain.  http://pestworldforkids.org/pest-guide/pill-bugs/

Did you know there is a brown food chain?  Here is a TED ed video that explains it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI7u_pcfAQE

This conversation then led to some further investigation into how landfills are formed and the process of managing human waste.  Here are a couple of videos we watched today:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC1u6rJkyzA
Touring Calgary Shepard's landfill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMSOl6RWpKw

We continue to expand our background knowledge and expression of our vocabulary words for waste in our world here are some examples of student generated vocabulary cards.  We've decide to create personal vocabulary books that will represent our vocabulary in different subjects.