Have you ever swallowed a watermelon seed?
Do you know what happens when you swallow a watermelon seed? Come see our day on watermelons and how we explored watermelon seeds!
Starting the Day
We started our day with reading “The Watermelon Seed” by Greg Pizzoli – this is a great book if you haven’t read it! This book is a about a crocodile who just absolutely loves watermelon! He eats watermelon for every meal and one day he accidentally swallows a watermelon seed. The panic sets in and he brainstorms what will happen to him since he swallowed this watermelon seed. This book always makes for great discussion in circle time!
The Follow-Up Activity
Following the book, we did an interactive math activity. I had blown up little green balloons, decorated them like a watermelon and placed a random number of black beads inside to represent the seeds. The students had to go fetch a pair of scissors and clip their watermelon off the vine. Then, the best part, they had to pop their “watermelons”!
I gave each child a cup to collect their seeds and then we all sat down together to count how many seeds each child had in their watermelon. Since they were all random amounts, I incorporated some graphing and we discussed who had the most and who had the least. The children even practiced writing the number that represented how many seeds they had!
Counting Our Seeds
Then, we took our seeds to our math table to line everything up in a bar graph. We discussed why some student’s lines were taller than others and at the very end we counted up how many total seeds we had in all of our watermelons combined! At the end the children wanted to pile their seeds up in the middle.