How to Roast a Pumpkin... and what to do with it

It is no secret that I LOVE pumpkins.  I've blogged about them many times, and cooked with them many more than that.  My students have helped me choose pumpkins at the market, taken photos with them, done art and sensory activities with them, cooked them, made muffins, pies, bread with them, grown them, roasted the seeds, learned about their life cycle, and over the last 10 years, eaten hundreds of pounds of pumpkin.  I REALLY like pumpkins!

What a surprise to realize that a lot of people don't know how easy it is to cook your own pumpkins, or how much sense it makes financially.  Today I want to show you!

Step 1: Procure pumpkin.  I got this beauty at my local Farmers' Market last Sunday.

Step 2: Cut it in half.  I learned the hard way that trying to peel a pumpkin is worse than herding cats.  Trust me, the flesh will come out much easier after it is baked!

Step 3: Remove the stringy bits and seeds.  I like to keep the seeds for roasting - they are delicious, and you are already going to have the oven going - you may as well have a yummy salty snack while you are waiting for the rest of the pumpkin to cook.  Which reminds me, turn on the oven to 350*.

Put the prepared pumpkin halves in an oven safe container that has sides - most pumpkins will release a fair amount of juice while cooking.  Here are my pumpkin seeds washed, and soaking in salted water.  You can leave them soaking for a few hours before cooking, or if you are impatient, skip the soaking.  Use spray oil on a cookie sheet so they don't stick, sprinkle them with salt, and put them in the oven.

I was really surprised that this particular batch took 30 minutes to cook through - thinner seeds may take as little as 10 minutes.  The seeds of every pumpkin are different, so you need to check on your roasting seeds every 10 minutes or so, and pull them out when you are satisfied with them.  This is the darkest I've ever roasted them (on purpose) and they were really good!

Let these cool a little, and then pop some in your mouth - you can eat them whole, even the seed coat.  If you have some left, let them cool completely and then store in a sealed container.  We didn't have any left. 

Here's the cooked pumpkin - this particular one was very dense, and cooked for 100 minutes.  I tested with a fork every 15 minutes after the first hour.  The pumpkin is done when the fork goes in easily - you want the flesh to be nice and soft.

Scrape the soft flesh right out of the skin with a spoon, and put it in a blender or food processor.  You may need to add a little of the juice that has separated from the pumpkin, depending on your processor.  If it is still hot when you do it, please be extra careful, only fill the blender/processor half way, leave a small opening for steam to escape, and lay a towel over the top of it before you blend.  You do not want to be splashed by hot pumpkin!  Pour the pureed flesh into storage containers.

I used plastic containers that lunch meat was packaged in, they're a handy dandy 2 cups size, and stack nicely to refrigerate or freeze.  I let them cool on top of ice packs on my counter until they are cool enough to go in the refrigerator.   That's all there is to it!

Your pumpkin puree will be a thinner consistency than what you get from a can of pumpkin, because you've retained all the juices.  You may need to adjust your recipes accordingly. 

This particular pumpkin cooked up to a lovely golden yellow - again, each type of pumpkin is different.  Experiment to find which variety you like best, and which ones have the nicest seeds.  I ended up with 8 cups of cooked pumpkin, as this was a medium sized pumpkin.  I've had large pumpkins yield over 25 cups before - so I freeze what I don't need immediately.  Use it within 6 months.

So why bother eating pumpkin anyway?  It seems like a lot of work, spending 2 hours in the kitchen to roast and process it, is it worth it?  I think so!  The cost per cup is much less than if you bought a can at the grocery store, and it is fresher.  You may even know the farmer that grew your pumpkin.  (I'm taking the grower some of the muffins on Sunday, and maybe getting another pumpkin.) 

Nutritionally, pumpkin is phenomenal!  According to SELFNutritionData, each cup of pumpkin has 3 grams of fiber, 2 grams of protein, 19% of your daily vitamin C needs, and 245% of your daily vitamin A!

My favorite way to eat pumpkin is in my pumpkin gingerbread muffins.  I started, long ago, with a recipe I found on-line, and have tweaked and changed it until it's truly my own recipe.  I have people beg me for these.  Warning - they are hard to resist!

Pumpkin gingerbread muffins
ingredients:
2  cups sugar                    1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup applesauce           4 eggs         
***3 cups pumpkin puree (homemade)
2 tsp ground ginger           1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon                  1 tsp cloves
2 cups white flour              1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking soda              1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder

***If using canned pumpkin, add 2/3 cup of water.

directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees  F.  Grease 2 muffin pans (recipe makes 60 mini muffin, or 30 regular).
In a large mixing bowl combine sugar, oil and eggs, beat until smooth.  Add water, pumpkin, and spices, stir.
In another bowl combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt.  Add dry ingredients to the pumpkin mix and combine.  Pour into muffin tins and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, about 20 minutes (12 minutes for mini muffins).
Even although this makes a huge batch, they remain incredibly moist and fresh for about 4 days - if you can resist that long.  They also freeze well. 

Happy fall everyone!

Whoo-Whoo Loves Owls?

Owl imagery seems to be everywhere lately - from clothing to classrooms, home decor to Harry Potter movies.  Perhaps that's where it all started, but regardless, they are pretty fascinating creatures!

I've been thinking (and creating) about owls a LOT lately.  I was even lucky enough to find an owl pellet in my new backyard recently- totally cool!  I've been looking back through my photos for a couple of days, and cannot find (yet) photos of our owls crafts.  I do however have a lot of owl activities on my owls pinterest board, if you are looking for crafts.

I thought I'd start with a freebie, because really, who doesn't like free things?!  This packet includes color by number owl puzzles for addition and for subtraction, and an ordering by size page too.

If your kids love it, I have a larger pack available too.  Here's an example of what's included:

Have you ever worked in a school that didn't allow a Halloween theme?  Bats, owls and spiders make a nice alternative to witches and ghosts if you do!  This set has AB, ABC, AAB and ABB patterns made with bats and owls.  There are 12 pattern strips for students to extend, and for each pattern type I also included a worksheet  to continue patterns, and a make-your-own pattern page to engage higher level thinking skills.

For students who are already fairly fluent readers - I aimed for 2nd to 3rd grade, but of course, there are always students whose reading level is higher or lower - I wrote a non-fiction book about owls, which includes a reading comprehension page.  I learned so many cool things about owls while I was researching this project - like that different owls nest in very different places, from trees and on buildings, to nests on the ground, and even in borrows!  I love connecting different disciplines, like science and reading!

Last fall I worked on some fun owl hundreds charts mystery pictures, and created two different sets: an early primary number recognition set and a set that requires students to solve addition, subtraction andmultiplication problems.

The last owl activity I have for you today is a set of 4 telling time foldergames.
This is the game for time to the half hour.  There are also games for time to the hour, to the hour and half hour, and to the quarter hour.

Don't you love owls?

I've also linked up this week with
 
I posted my Owls Freebie - and there are LOTS of other cool goodies.  I hope you'll go check it out!

Teaching children to wash their hands

Children are young scientists, true hands-on learners.  Those little hands go everywhere!

We know one of the best ways to stay healthy is to wash our hands properly, but as anyone who has ever had/seen/known/been a child knows, children don't always do it well!  As an early childhood teacher, I've heard my share of, "they look clean to me".

I think that's the problem for a lot of kiddos.  Unless they can see something on their hands that they personally consider gross, they look "clean enough".  This makes sense in a way, children are concrete thinkers and learners.  If we want them to wash off invisible germs, we have to find a way to make them concrete for the children.

Several years ago I came up with a solution - glitter paint!  I explained to my students that germs are a lot like glitter: very very small, and very, very sticky.  I put a tiny squirt of glitter paint into their hands, and have them rub it in.

Then we hug each other, pass a few toys around - do all the normal things that children do.  After a couple of minutes, we look for glitter.  It's invariably on everything we touched, and lots of things we don't even remember touching: the carpet, our clothes, the toys, our faces.  That stuff gets around!

Seeing that glitter (and by extension germs) spread really easily is a good start, but next we have to learn how to get rid of it!

I model washing my hands super fast, just a quick splash under the faucet, and then we look at my hands.  Oh dear!  Glitter (and germs!) everywhere still!  I try again with soap but not much rubbing.  Again, there's still glitter all over my hands.

At this point the kiddos can usually tell me that I need to use soap, rub it all over my hands, and rinse well.  Sometimes we count to 20 (20 seconds is the recommended handwashing time), and sometimes we sing the Happy Birthday song twice.  When we look at my hands again, there's still glitter left, but not much.  I challenge the children to see how much glitter they can wash off, and they get busy!

Check it out, this little guy is really rubbing his hands together in the water!  So what's the result?

Clean hands!  (I love how the boy in the back is really looking at his hands to see how well he did!)

I recently had 2 former parents mention that their children take forever to wash their hands, counting outloud to 20 of all things.  Their children just started third grade.  It's been at least 3 years since they did this activity with me.  I think it stuck!

International Dot Day

Do you know this book?

It's the lovely tale of Vashti, a child who doesn't think she can draw.  At her teacher's urging, she makes a mark on her paper, a simple dot.  When the teacher frames it in a swirly gold frame and displays it, Vashti begins to believe she can draw, at least a dot.

This simple tale speaks to me as a teacher - for surely, how we react to our students influences what they believe about themselves  - and also as an artist.  A very imperfect artist, but like Vashti, I can try.

I thought I'd share some of the pictures of how my preschoolers celebrated International Dot Day last year, and encourage you to join in the fun.  We draw and do art projects all the time, so my kiddos, like most 3-5 year olds, already knew they were artists.  :-)  I decided to talk about dots, and the dot Vashti made with negative space, and of course, we got out the dot paints, aka bingo dabbers.  Everyone made several dot paintings, just enjoying the medium.

It's important to let the children have time with new materials, so they can explore and be comfortable with it.  Until then, they're not likely to be interested in someone else's suggestions.

Once the kiddos had explored the dabbers, I put some cardboard circles out on the table.  I placed one in the center of my blank paper, and joined in on the dabbing, mostly avoiding the cardboard circle.  You can see from the circles on the table, once we started using them, a lot of the kiddos wanted to dab only on the cardboard.  That works too!

Most of the children joined in with using the cardboard circles, although not everyone wanted to do that, which, again, is fine.  They were fascinated by the negative space left when they lifted the cardboard - and several of them made the connection to the book, and Vashti's dot that wasn't a dot painting.

The children helped me choose two pictures each to display on the wall in our lunch area - enough to fill the wall.  I didn't have them make swirly gold frames like Vashti's teacher, but that would be an awesome touch!  I've seen that done here.

There's actually an International Dot Day, on September 15th-ish, and as of this writing, people in 107 countries have signed up to participate - 2,900,000 people!  There are official posters and an educator's handbook availabe on their website.  If you'd like to join in, follow this link!

I've also started collecting ideas on my pinterest board: International Dot Day. 

I'd love to hear your ideas, and to pin them there too - please let me know how you celebrate in the comments!

Seasons

Yesterday I took a break from everything, and sat outside with my camera.  I love to focus in on the tiny details around me, I find it very relaxing.  I took these shots:

Right away, looking at these, you know what season it is - right?  Blooming lilies, insects, hummingbirds, intensely green leaves - it's summer.  And yesterday it really was summer.

Today the crepe myrtles are still in bloom, the temperature is heading towards hot, and I know the farmer's market will be stocked with tomatoes and cucumbers and all the delicious summer fruits that I love, and yet...  Look what I found on my walk this morning:

There it is, fall, lurking around the corner!

This got me to thinking, as teachers will, about prepping for all the fun fall activities that we so love to do with our kiddos.

Finding pine cones had me thinking of all the ways I've used them with the kiddos, from fall sensory bins, to craft supplies.  My kiddos loved making a Thanksgiving turkey from a pine cone, and we made mini Christmas trees with them a lot of years...

Sorting leaves by color, and of course we'd have to read Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert with that...

Oh how we loved playing in the leaves in the back yard!  How many piles of leaves have I facilitated over the years?!

 All those fall leaves and other treasures are wonderful for making mandalas, and talking about symmetry and number.  We used a salt dough base to hold them in place....

 ... and the plastic tray that once held party food to sort them...

We've made Leaf Man pictures to follow up another great Lois Ehlert book for fall...  and if I keep going back through my photos, or open my teacher binders, there are so many more great activities!

I've been thinking about all this, and have made several activities about changing seasons.

 This one would be perfect in a pocket chart...

 ... or on a sorting board like this one, made with colored poster board.

My five year olds who were starting to read really enjoyed sentence-picture matching games, like this one...

... and the challenge of logical reasoning, figuring out clues, like this:

Yes, I must say, I'm ready for fall!  Which season or special seasons activity does your class most love?

How I Organize My Books

As a new teacher, I had a lovely collection of children's books - a couple of hundred, which I had collected during my college years.  They filled almost 2 whole shelves!  When I needed one, I could usually spot it pretty quickly, because I knew what they all looked like - and because there were only 2 shelves to look through.

Later, as my collection of teacher stuff (it's a technical term!) grew, I needed to find better ways to organize it.  I tried a filing cabinet, but had too many papers for each file.  Binders were an improvement - but what to do with all the other 'bits' like manipulatives and toys and... stuff?  I moved on to plastic totes, which were marvelous as they could hold the binders of papers, the books AND stuff.  I became a regular at Target, collecting an impressive collection of plastic totes to store my ever expanding teacher stuff.

I had a tote for each season, and for all the themes I taught: apples, circus, fall, farms... not to mention major (and minor) holidays.  I was really fortunate to have a lot of storage in my house... a lot of which was filled with shelves of totes.  If   When I found new things I needed for teaching, I could slip them immediately into the correct tote, knowing that when it came time to teach that theme, it would be there waiting for me.  (Notice I said 'could', not 'always did'.)

Until.

It began with The Hat, a popular book by Jan Brett.  I needed it for a lesson.  So I looked in my winter tote.  Not there.  Okay, maybe the farm tote, there are a lot of farm animals in the story.  Nope.  Clothing?  No.  I looked and looked, knowing full well that I had the book... somewhere.

After many totes and several muttered naughty words, I went to my husband.  I told him something that was really hard for me to say, or even to think.  I said, "I have too many books.  I can't find them."

It's a testament to the kind of husband he is, that he did not jump and cheer and tell me he was glad I had finally figured it out and could he please have a little of the closet space those books and stuff were taking up?  I am so very grateful that he told me that I didn't have too many books, I just needed a better organization system, library software.  Then he researched what was available, how much it cost, and downloaded it for me!  (No teachers, you can't have him, I'm keeping him!)

The solution was ReaderWare.  I'm still using it and loving it ten years down the road!  For a whopping $39.95, it does everything I can think of except put the books on the shelf.

I type in the ISBN# from the back of the book, and Readerware searches the internet for all the information I could possibly want, and organizes it.  Within a few seconds of entering a book, Readerware pulls a picture of the cover, title, author, publishing date, book reviews...

Everything is editable, so you can add, delete, or change information to suit your needs.  Sometimes I find incomplete data, a second author not listed for example - but I can add it in if I want.  I love the keywords section.  This is where I put in every possible theme that I might use a book with.  The Hat has keywords: winter, farm, clothing, animals.  I add these because everything is searchable.

I can search by 27 features: author, title, category, and KEYWORDS.  So now, when I want a book on lets say, apples, I search by keyword and get...

... a list of every book I own that is tagged apples! 

The most difficult part of organizing my books was not adding them into Readerware, it was putting them up on  my shelves.  I decided to alphabetize by author, which makes finding them super easy - especially with my list from Readerware.  I can print it out if I need, or more often pull it up on the computer then walk over to my shelves and grab what I need.  No more searching for a book, no more trying to remember who the author is, or even which books I have for each theme.  Many times since I got this, teacher friends have come to me and asked if I have anything they could use for a lesson on xyz - and I can find it in less than a minute!  Did I mention that Readerware also lets you track books you've loaned out?  Yes, no more forgetting to get your books back, or who borrowed which one.

There are so many great things about Readerware, I can't begin to tell you everything I love about it.  If you have ever had to search for a book, and think this might be a solution for you, they offer a 30 day free trial, but purchase, as of the time I'm writing, is still only $39.95.  Need to know more?  http://www.readerware.com/index.php/products/details/books_details

Happy reading to you!

Paula