I taught big kids, 5th-8th grades. And I loved working with big kids. But my own children are little, in 1st and 2nd grade this year, and I’ve learn so much about the primary grades the last few years because of them. I love getting the chance to volunteer with some of their fun projects.
Today I got to help with “Pumpkin Day” in 
my son’s first grade class. We had so much fun.
Each parent volunteer brought a pumpkin and worked at a table with five or six kids. The activities included a variety of math skills as well as a lot of small and large group collaboration and problem solving.
We estimated the circumference of the pumpkin and then measured to find the actual circumference. Then we compared circumferences to the other groups to determine largest and smallest.
We did the same for height and weight.
The most fun, though, was when we got to estimate and then try to count how many pumpkin seed were in each pumpkin! My group decided to put the seeds into piles of ten to make them easier to count. We weren’t able to pull all of the seeds out of the muck in the time we had, but we put forth a noble effort and ended up counting just over 386 seeds. 🙂
It was so much fun to see the kids excited about math, excited about working together. It was a great afternoon.
