I haven't posted in a while because I have been so busy and I have had a lot going on! Halloween was last Thursday and it was a "charged" day in third grade to say the least! At our school, they students aren't allowed to dress up, so that helps a little when it comes to keeping the kids calm. I love to bring pumpkins into the classroom and do a whole "pumpkin" themed day! I used this activity pack from my TpT store and it filled up our whole day! 
We used the pumpkin observation sheet that I created and the students were able to use their senses to record their observations. This part they took very seriously. They had their clipboards and looked carefully at their groups pumpkin. Once they were done recording their observations, they estimated how many seed were in their pumpkin. They made several estimations throughout the process and they were able to adjust their estimation once the seeds were out of the pumpkin and once they saw what 50 seeds looked like. There were a lot of, "ooooooooooooooh's" once they saw how little "50" seeds were. They realized quickly that 100 was a guess that was too low!
Once they made their final estimate, they took turns counting out all the pumpkin seeds and grouping them by 100s. When they started doing this, they were able to see that they could multiply by 100 and then add the remaining seed. That made for a happy third grade teacher since we had been talking about multiplication for over a month!
I let some of my students take some pictures. Here is a lovely shot of me...helping to hold the pumpkin as they scooped out the "guts."
Here are some of my "counters" separating the seeds into 100 groups.
Here are the seeds from one group counted out and grouped by 100s. The final group had 27 seeds. It was exciting to see the kids walking across the table counting trays, multiplying or adding by 100's. They were very excited to get the total!
The rest of the day we did pumpkin poems, spooky writing, sequence writing (how to carve a jack-o-lantern) and differentiated math story problems. All of these can be found in my TpT store. It was a great day and one of my students even came up to me at the end of the day and thanked me for such a fun day!
The added bonus is that you get to roast and eat all 2,156 seeds!
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pumpkins-Observations-Seed-Estimation-Writing-Poetry-and-Math-949050
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