Following the Child -- pumpkin style

One of the things that I love about Montessori is her philosophy to "follow the child." Today was a typical example of this, as we went from art to practical life to math to science -- all in one morning session!

Aikman is ALL about painting right now, and I had been wanting to do some veggie stamping activities with him, like the ones seen here, here, and here. Aikman helped me cut a pumpkin in half (actually it was a decorative gourd, but I didn't tell him that). We didn't try to carve anything unique out of it... just paint the half to see what the print would look like.

To his surprise, the seeds did not print on the paper. This lead to him discovering that since the seeds sank in some from the skin/flesh, that they did not show up on the paper.

This lead to digging the seeds out with a spoon, followed by washing the paint off of the seeds (practical life activities).

We then laid the seeds out to dry, and his next comment was, "I think there are 100 seeds in the pumpkin." I told him after the seeds dried, we would count them to see exactly how many seeds we collected.

We then talked about the "parts of a pumpkin" and how it had many of the same parts as the apple -- skin, flesh, seeds, stem. This lead to a discussion on the pumpkin lifecycle, which I printed from here. (You can see the perfectionism in him already as he not only had to cut each piece exactly on the lines, but he also had to cut out each image in the order that it grew.)

Whew... what a fun, and adventuresome (rainy) day -- all about pumpkins and all initiated by Aikman.