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Lesson Reflection

I love doing hands on activities with my students. Being able to carve a pumpkin and

discuss what we thought might be inside are things that I love to do. I also think that there needs

to be more hands-on activities in school, having a small class I am better able to prepare for

hands on activities. Overall the lesson went very well, the students were engaged and seemed to

enjoy the content. They enjoyed making guesses about what the pumpkin would look and feel

like, and they also liked touching the pumpkin to see if their guesses were right.

If I were to do this lesson again, I would change a couple of things. I would make this at

the end of a small unit on pumpkins. Even though my students are in 4th-6th grades they could

still learn about the life cycle of a pumpkin and how plants grow. I would add in the pumpkin life

cycle to help them to understand where a pumpkin comes from and how it grows, so when we

talk about the inside of the pumpkin, they might know what it looks like. Having this foundation

would ensure their knowledge base.

Another thing that I should have went over a little more is the vocabulary that they were

using to describe the pumpkin. It could have also been a language lesson teaching about verbs,

adverbs, using describing words, and the senses. The students used some great words to describe

the pumpkin both on the outside and the inside, they may have done better with a language

lesson before. Writing the words on the chart paper with their guesses and then going back and

writing the new words and crossing out the things that were not true was a good visual for the

students and incorporated the language.

Lastly, I would also try to incorporate math some more. I had the estimation in my lesson

plan as an extra incase we have time, and we did. We counted by 10’s, but I should have circled

the piles of 10’s and wrote the numbers as we were counting them to make the knowledge a little
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more concrete. Also adding in carving the pumpkin and having the students pick out the shapes

that we carve. They might not have known that they were doing math because it would have

been so much fun.

I really liked this lesson; it was the first time I have done this lesson with a class. I will do

it again in the future, and probably make it the end to a pumpkin unit.