How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?

This library book detailed a class's investigation into the number of seeds inside of a pumpkin. We followed the same steps as the children in the story, except we worked with only one pumpkin while the children in the book worked with three- a small, a medium, and a large.

Before cutting open the pumpkin, we each made a guess as to how many seeds were in our small pumpkin. Some guessed as little as "2" while some thought there would be "10,000".

Then we scooped out all the seeds.

Which felt, "slimy", "icky sticky", and "disgusting".

In the book How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?, the teacher, Mr. Tiffin cleaned the seeds and put them in a toaster oven to cook. There is no oven at school, so this was done at home that evening.

This morning we were prepared to count our pumpkin seeds! In the book, the children broke into groups in order to count the seeds they found in the three pumpkins. One group has counted by twos, one group by fives, and one group by tens. We decided to count using photocopies of the Montessori material, the "100 board", placing one seed on each squared number.

 

And we discovered there were 495 pumpkin seeds in our small pumpkin.

We had 4 sets of 100 and an extra 95 seeds which prompted us to write out these equations.

I was completely surprised there was almost 500 seeds in a small pumpkin. I wasn't surprised however, that most of the children enjoyed eating the pumpkin seeds after all that work!