Mt. Madonna teacher grew fruit as learning tool for students
Gilroy – A 469-pound pumpkin surprised Mt. Madonna School third, fourth and fifth grade students Tuesday by yielding just 725 seeds, but also provided them with a science and gardening lesson.
Science teacher Diane Sampson used the orange giant, grown in her own Watsonville garden, as a learning tool for her class. Students used what they’d learned in class to come up with an educated guess about how many seeds the pumpkin would contain and what size the seeds would be.
“Based on a lesson we did last year, we learned that small pumpkins have small seeds, medium pumpkins, like the kind you use for jack-o’-lanterns, have medium seeds, and big pumpkins have big seeds,” Sampson said. “Last year, we looked at a 240-pound pumpkin that had been donated to us and talked about the seeds. We planted some of them in hopes of proving that big seeds make big pumpkins. It didn’t really work in our Children’s Garden, but we think that location may have had something to do with that.”
As part of the test, Sampson purchased three seeds from a 900-pound pumpkin in Nova Scotia. Though just one sprouted, it yielded the 469-pound behemoth used in yesterday’s lesson. The class will, in turn, plant seeds from this pumpkin in a new location in their garden to see if they can grow their own “super squash.”
“The kids learned about estimating seeds, they learned how to count a large number of things – we separated the seeds into piles of ten and counted the piles – and how to grow something big,” Sampson said. “Most students really overshot their guess on the seeds. There were a lot of guesses in the thousands. I was expecting 300 to 400, so I was wrong, too.”
The winning guess belonged to Shaun Bramhall, a fifth grade student who guess 572 seeds. Sampson had to use a chainsaw to cut the pumpkin open because the rind was 5 to 6 inches thick.
