How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin?

We read How Many Seeds in a Pumpkin to get us thinking about pumpkins before our field trip to Grenier's.

In the book, the characters learn some pumpkin facts and count the seeds in a pumpkin.

Of course, we had to try this too. So we cut into a pumpkin and estimated the number of seeds in it. Our estimations ranged from 100 to 300. 

After we estimated, everyone joined a "Twos Club," "Tens Club," or "Fives Club" and got to work cleaning seeds and counting by 2s, 10s, and 5s!

Each "club" had to count together to determine the total number of seeds they had.

After counting, each club reported out their number of seeds. We changed our estimations to 400-500.

Then we got to work adding up these huge numbers! We decomposed the numbers into their hundreds, tens, and ones (expanded notation!) We added the 100s together, then the 10s, then the 1s. We ended up with 587 seeds total!

If that isn't cool enough, one of our mathematicians stated that we only needed 13 more to get to 600. Several students agreed and proved that the statement was true with more equations!

Have you counted the number of seeds in your pumpkin?