Pumpkin Persuasion Paper

As we get closer to Halloween I love doing a mini unit on pumpkins. This year we read two pumpkin stories: The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons and Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden by George Levenson.

After reading these stories I did an activity I found on Pinterest on the life cycle of a pumpkin. You can access the activity here. The entry is dated November 11, 2010.

After that I have the students do a Pumpkin Persuasion Paper. I tell the students that they are no longer humans, but pumpkins in my pumpkin patch. I want to pick one of them to take home and carve for my Halloween Jack O' Lantern. I tell them that they don't want to be picked and carved up, so they have to write to me to convince me why they are NOT the pumpkin to pick. 

I have learned over the years that I really need to emphasize that they are not humans, but pumpkins. Sometimes, they don't get that and think that I want to carve them up! The ideas they come up with are really great! I have included the directions and a pumpkin template here and here.

Enjoy!

Making Sentences

A fun activity students can do when working on making sentences is they can cut out words from a magazine and put them together to make a sentence making sure that the first word they find starts with a capital letter. They can write in the punctuation. They would also need to make sure they have a subject and predicate. Then they can illustrate their sentence. Here is an example of one that one of my students did.