Pumpkin Soup and Pumpkin Rolling...

Welcome to Pumpkin Soup Day!  We read the book Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper:  

We had a lot of fun chopping up the ingredients and preparing our soup.  We used Sweet Potatoes:  

We cut up garlic and onions---which had a few of the kids tearing up!

And we chopped up pumpkins.  I don't really think "chopped up" is the right word here.  These pumpkins were NEARLY impossible to cut!  We tried several knives and ended up relying mostly on strong muscles to get into them.  It was unbelievable just how difficult this step was!We also peeled the sweet potatoes.  

 Then we chopped our sweet potatoes.

 And we scooped out the pumpkins (once they were open).

 Then we softened the sweet potatoes in the microwave and mashed them a bit.

 While the soup cooked in the crock pots, we went outside to work on our science experiment.  We rolled three different sized pumpkins down the playground slide.  We guessed that the largest one would roll the furthest.

 We tried each of the pumpkins three times and measured and recorded the data.

 Can you believe that the small and large pumpkin BOTH rolled the same distance?

 We tried it again just to be sure.

 Yep.  It was VERY close each time.

 When we returned to our room, the soup looked like this:

 So we had to use the blender to puree it:

 And then it looked like this:

 When we tasted it, some of us added a dollop of sour cream to it.  And others added a teaspoon of brown sugar.

 Several of the kids liked it, but many did not.  We talked about the fact that sometimes you have to tweak a recipe to make it better.  And we also talked about the fact that our taste buds change as we get older, so we might like it today, but sometime in the future, that could change.  All in all, it was an extremely busy and productive day!!