Farmer Appreciation Day: Poster Making & Set Up!

Students wanted to create special posters for decorating our classroom on Farmer Appreciation Day.  We brainstormed messages together and students decided whether they'd like to work with others on big banner posters or individually on smaller posters.  Students worked really hard to do their best printing, drawing, designing and coloring.

 Yesterday afternoon, we started setting up for the event.  We moved the furniture around in our room to get ready for our farmer guests and we started putting up our posters.  It sure looks great in our classroom and I'm so proud of the students for their amazing learning, teamwork and passion! 

Whether it was lifting tables, stacking chairs, setting out cookies or last minute poster-coloring, everyone pitched in to get ready!  We even had a student photographer take pictures to show our setup day.  I helped out with counting chairs, "directing traffic" and reaching some hard-to-reach spots for posters.  Otherwise, the students did most of the work.  They are really engaged in their learning and excited about their project!

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Farmer Appreciation Day: Making Pumpkin Puree

When students decided they'd like to make their big pumpkin into pumpkin cookies, we asked a parent who grows pumpkins to share a "tried and true" recipe.  We read the recipe together as part of our text type study.  One of the ingredients in the recipe confused students - it called for "pumpkin puree" and most of us didn't know what that was.  After we figured out what the recipe was asking for, we decided that we would need to find out how to turn our pumpkin into puree.  We added "find out how to make pumpkin puree" to our Farmer Appreciation Day to do list and here's what we've done:

•  First, we researched how to make pumpkin puree online and read information/steps from a couple of different websites

• Next, we made teams to be in charge of different steps in the process - Cut & Clean, Cook & Scoop and Mix and Mash

• Finally, we got to work on actually making our very own pumpkin puree!

Making Pumpkin Puree

Team Cut & Clean

Students on this team worked together to cut the pumpkin into pieces and to clean out the seeds and strings. 

 Team Cook & Scoop

This team was in charge of loading pieces of pumpkin into baking trays, carrying them to the oven and helping me check the pumpkin as it cooked.  After the pumpkin was cooked, they scooped the soft cooked pumpkin into bowls.  

 Team Mix and Mash

Students on this team took the soft, cooked pumpkin and mixed it until it was nice and smooth. 

Reading Activity

As a follow-up activity, we talked about sequence in procedural texts and students read and sequenced the steps for making pumpkin puree.

Farmer Appreciation Day Project: Reading Recipes

Class Decision Making:
We are planning to make farmers a special treat for the Farmer Appreciation Day we are hosting.  After much discussion and a couple of rounds of voting, we decided to bake chocolate chip cookies and pumpkin cookies.  With that decision made, we've got right to work on the preparation required!

A side note: A high school student that grew pumpkins in her family garden had donated a large pumpkin to our class before Halloween.  Students decided it would be unfair if one student got to carve the big pumpkin during our pumpkin carving center, so they opted to save the big pumpkin for making a treat for farmer appreciation.  (Honestly, THEY came up with that!  I know it probably sounds like a "let's be fair" teacher idea, but students really decided that. And, of course, I'm proud of them for coming up with a fair and interesting idea for using our pumpkin!)  Little did they know, I've never made ANYTHING from a pumpkin, despite my extensive baking experience.  Looks like I will be learning right alongside my students! Here we come pumpkin cookies!  

Recipes:
This week, we have been focusing on studying cookie recipes.  As a teacher, it fits in really well with my division-recommended Literacy Place lessons.  One of the recommended text-type studies for procedural writing focuses on recipes, so I'm glad to have an authentic reason for teaching students about recipes!  And more importantly, students have a real reason to learn about recipes - they want to make cookies for our event!  Suddenly, we have a much deeper purpose for our reading and much more urgency to learn. 

Many learning opportunities have arose from our recipe reading already:

• more or less - we've learned to look for amounts of flour, eggs, sugar and margarine to determine if a recipe will make more or less cookies than another recipe
• comparison - aside from quantities of ingredients, students noticed some recipes included different ingredients like oatmeal, coconut or M&Ms
• considering allergies - some recipes called for nuts, which we could not bring into our nut safe school
• importance of order - procedural texts often have a logical sequence and we discussed the importance of following recipe directions in order 
• vocabulary - "shortening" was one example of an unfamiliar word that came up in our reading - we have had some good discussions about new and interesting words
• further research - one of the pumpkin cookie recipes we read called for pumpkin puree, so we added to our project to do list -"find out how to make pumpkin puree"