Pumpkins provide fun, learning

FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP - Fourth-graders at the Marshall W. Errickson School, Elton-Adelphia Road, held their annual Pumpkin Fest in October to celebrate the season while practicing math and creative skills in a festive way.

The Pumpkin Fest was a multi-curricular activity for all fourth-graders at Errickson and was supported by parent volunteers who provided the supplies and time to help with the activities.

During the day, students rotated through five stations set up in the classroom. To hone in on math skills, a pumpkin weighing and graphing station was used to predict and record weights of pumpkins and display results on a bar graph.

At a second station, students predicted and counted the amount of seeds inside a pumpkin and were surprised to learn that larger pumpkins had fewer seeds.

The fourth-graders expressed their creative side at three stations including pumpkin decorating with various materials and poem reading where a descriptive poem was read for students to visualize a scene and draw it on paper.

At the last station, students created paper jack-o-lanterns and wrote a story describing its adventures on Halloween. They needed to name their jack-o-lantern, create trouble for it and find a solution to the problem. The stories were then published in a class book.

Liz Szoc, one of the fourth grade teachers, said the event required students to work cooperatively as well as independently throughout the event.

"It all went very smoothly thanks to the help of parent volunteers and the students had a wonderful time while they learned," she said.