(upbeat music) - Hi, welcome to Room 9, the region's largest classroom. I'm Briana Trager, and I teach in the
Melville School District. But today, I'll be teaching
science for early learners. I really love the fall. The weather starts to get cold, the leaves change colors, and there is so much science that we can explore
and learn about. Today, we're gonna talk about
a really popular fall item that some of you guys might
even have in your homes. We're gonna look at pumpkins. We're gonna think
li
ke scientists and make observations,
ask questions, and see what we can learn about these really
popular fall decor. So, let's start with just
making some observations. What are some things that
you know about pumpkins? Let's take a look at these. Did you make some observations
about those pumpkins, or maybe even ask
some questions? Did you notice that
our two pumpkins were not only different colors,
but different sizes too? You may have also noticed
that they both have this stem up at the top h
ere, and have some of these lines going down all the way
around our pumpkin. There's a lot of different
questions we could ask, like why is this one orange
and this one's white? How are they formed,
where do they come from? Or what's inside? A really fun way to learn more about pumpkins is
to open them up. But we can't just do
that with our hands, so if you're gonna
try this at home, you're gonna need
a parent to help. Because I'm gonna
use a carving knife to open these two pumpkins
up and explo
re the insides. What do you think is in there? Have you ever opened
a pumpkin before? Let's find out. Now that I've safely
cut around the top of each of these pumpkins, let's take a look inside. There's actually a scientific
word for what I just did. It's called dissection. It means we're
gonna open this up and see what's inside
and learn more about it. What sort of
predictions do you have about what we might find
inside this pumpkin? Earlier, I said that these
are a really popular decor or deco
ration
maybe for your home or your front porch in the fall. But did you know that
pumpkins are also plants? Or maybe you've had pumpkin pie or anything else
pumpkin-flavored? Because we actually
eat pumpkins too. So knowing that this
pumpkin is a plant, what do you think we're
gonna find inside? Let's take a look. What are some things
that you see in there? We'll dig in in just a second, but let's take a look
at the other one. What do you notice
was the difference between these two pumpkins? The
y're a different size. This one's a little bit smaller, and this one's a
little bit larger. And we started with
our orange pumpkin, and take a look
inside one more time. Knowing what's inside
our orange pumpkin, what do you think we're gonna
see inside the white one? This one's also a plant. And although it might not
be the most popular pumpkin, we usually see our
orange pumpkins, they are formed in
a very similar way. So we might see some of the
same things on the inside. But we'll notice that
this
one's a different color on the outside, so do
you think it's gonna be a different color on the inside? Let's see. It looks very similar. Almost the same as
our orange pumpkin, but definitely a
different color. Now opening up a pumpkin
can get pretty messy because as you can see, there's
a lot of stuff in there. So I'm gonna set up a
space so that we can really dive into what's
inside these pumpkins without making too much
of a mess on my desk. I'll be right back. Now that I've put
down some
plastic wrap to protect our table, and
you can see that I have cut all the way around the
stem of our pumpkin so that we can
easily open it up, let's take a look inside. You can see that there are a lot of different
things going on in there, so I'm actually gonna use a
spoon to dig some of that out and take a look at
what we can find. I'm gonna scrape
along the edge here. You can see there's
a lot of these pieces inside there. These are actually
pumpkin seeds. And there looks like
there's a lot
inside there. Let's see how many
more we can dig out. These pumpkin seeds inside here are actually one way that we can tell that
a pumpkin is a plant. The seeds inside are actually what this little
pumpkin started out as. These small seeds get
planted into the ground, and eventually grow
into pumpkins like this. So inside our
pumpkin, as it grows, it's creating seeds so
that when we pick them and carve them or eat them, whatever it is we decide to do, there are plenty
more seeds inside to conti
nue to grow
more and more pumpkins. Pumpkin seeds are really cool because there's
actually a lot in there. So there's a good chance that
if you planted all of these, that you would get some pumpkins the next year that
you could use again. You also can actually
eat pumpkin seeds. Some plants, like
the pumpkin itself, we use for different
types of food, but this is one of the plants
where we also eat the seeds. Have you ever had pumpkin seeds? Sometimes you can them and put
different seasonings on
them like sugar or spices, and they're really delicious. Let's see what else is
inside of our pumpkin though. So we started to pull out
all of these different seeds inside of our pumpkin. But if you look inside there, you can tell there's
something else in there besides just the seeds. Let's see if we can
get some of it out. I'm gonna use my hands
just a little bit here to try to pull some of this out. See a lot of different seeds. But if I pull some
of these seeds off, what do you notice
is st
ill there? There's some of
this orange-colored material inside of our pumpkin. What do you think that's for? These stringy parts
inside of our pumpkin here that you can see if you look
really closely inside there, that's called the pulp. And you can probably notice it's helping to hold some
of those seeds inside. This part of our pumpkin
is actually edible, but sometimes,
people like to scrape all of that stringy part out and use a different
part of our pumpkin for making pumpkin puree or
other
foods out of pumpkin. Now that we've cleaned out
the inside of our pumpkin, you can see that it's
(hollow knocking) hollow in there or it's
open on the inside. So, we saw that there
were pumpkin seeds and pulp, or that stringy
orange stuff on the inside. We also have our
skin on the outside, (hollow knocking)
and it's pretty hard to protect that
inside of the pumpkin. But you might also see that there's this really
thick layer right here, and that's actually
the part of the pumpkin that a lot of
people use
for different types of food. You can cut the pumpkin
up, bake it in the oven, and use this part to make
pumpkin-flavored foods. There are so many different
ways that you can use that. So there's a way to use
all parts of our pumpkin, whether it's decor or food
or like we're doing today, using it for science. So we pulled a lot
of seeds out of here. (ominous Halloween music) How many seeds do
you think there are? There's quite a few. Let's see if we can count them. (ominous Halloween
music) That was a lot of seeds. Do you think you could
help me count them? You might've noticed that
as I was counting them, I was placing them on my
mat in a very certain way. I was actually
making groups of 10. So, I'm gonna help count by 10 and see if we can figure
out how many seeds were in this little
pumpkin right here. Let's count these
pumpkin seeds together. Each group has 10 pumpkin seeds. Let's count by tens together. 10. 20. 30. 40. 50. This is gonna be a
lot of pumpkin seeds. 60. 70
. 80. 90. You know what comes next? 100. There's over a hundred
pumpkin seeds here. 110. 120. 130. 140. 150. 160. Those were all of
our groups of 10. But over to the side,
we have a few more left. Let's count those by ones. We have one, two, three, four pumpkin seeds to the side. So we have 160 pumpkin seeds, plus the four that
are off to the side. That's 164 pumpkin seeds. That's a lot of seeds. That was pretty cool to see what was inside
our pumpkin here. So, let's take a look
inside of our ot
her pumpkin. It looks kind of
similar on the outside. It still has these lines
going down the side, the stem, and I've cut the top off so
that we can see the inside. But let's scoop it out and see if we find some of
the same things. Remember in our last pumpkin,
we found pumpkin seeds and the stringy pulp that
holds it all together. So, let's see what it
looks like inside this one. Let's take a look inside
our white pumpkin. You can see that it
looks very similar, but definitely has
some differe
nces. So let's use our spoon and
scrape some of this out of here. You can see this
pumpkin still has lots of pumpkin
seeds on the inside. Remember, these are the seeds that would eventually grow
into a whole new pumpkin if we were to plant
them in the ground. Our last pumpkin had 164 seeds. I'm not sure how
many this one has, but let's see if we
can dig them all out. You can also see that this
pumpkin also has that pulp, or that stringy
piece that's holding all of those seeds inside. The inside
of this
pumpkin's a lot lighter than the orange one, but let's see if this pulp is the same color as our
pulp from the other pumpkin. Can you see the difference? This one is the insides
of our orange pumpkin, and this is the inside
of our white pumpkin. So, the inside here looks
kind of a yellowish orange, but it's definitely
a lot lighter than our original pumpkin was. Let's scrape out some more. Here's a lot of our
seeds from this pumpkin. Do you think this white pumpkin, which was actually bi
gger
than our other pumpkin, do you think it has
more or less seeds? Now that I've cleaned out
the inside of this pumpkin, let's look at both
of these again. Because when we were looking
at them, the very beginning, we noticed a couple
of differences. That this pumpkin
is an orange color and this one's white
or a cream color, but also that this white
one is much bigger. So when we opened them
up, we saw that they both had seeds inside, which
all plants have seeds so that they can
continue to gro
w. They both had stems at the top. This is where it grew
off of the plant. And someone snipped our stem so that we could
have this pumpkin. And they had the same
parts on the inside too. They had this hard outer shell. (hollow knocking) Can you hear it? It's hollow, or
open on the inside, and it has a really thick layer of pumpkin that we can
use for different things. So if this pumpkin's bigger, do you think it's gonna
have more seeds inside? (ominous Halloween music) Here's our pile of seeds f
rom this pumpkin. What do you think? Let's count them. (ominous Halloween music) Which pumpkin do you
think had more seeds, the orange pumpkin
or the white pumpkin? We counted the orange
pumpkin seeds and found 164. Do you think there's gonna
be more white pumpkin seeds, or less white pumpkin seeds? Let's count them. These are in groups of 10 again, so let's count by tens. 10. 20. 30. 40. 50. 60. 70. 80. 90. 100. Now we still have a few more that didn't make a
full group of 10, so let's count th
ose
few over in the corner. One, two, three. We have 103 pumpkin seeds
in the white pumpkin. That means our white pumpkin
had less pumpkin seeds than the orange pumpkin. That was still a lot
of pumpkin seeds. 103 pumpkin seeds. But that is still less seeds than the first group
that we counted from our orange pumpkin. So we noticed that even though
this pumpkin was bigger, it still didn't have
more seeds inside. So sometimes when we're
wanting pumpkin seeds, we just have to cut it open and it see
how many
we find inside, because you can't always tell
how many are gonna be inside just based on the
size of our pumpkin. We talked about how pumpkins
are a great decoration for your home in the fall, and we learned a little
bit more about them by opening them up and
seeing what's inside. And we talked about how
a pumpkin is a plant that can also be food. We can eat pumpkins, and
the insides have seeds that can help us to grow more. So I mentioned that
there was a lot of science we could
do wi
th pumpkins, so we're actually gonna do a really fun science experiment that you can try at home
as well with a pumpkin. And you'll notice
that we're outside, because it's a little bit messy, but get ready to observe
some fun science. This activity is so
easy to do at home. You just need a few
simple ingredients. So, we're gonna start
with baking soda. We're gonna take
about a spoonful, and we're gonna drop that
inside of our pumpkin. Maybe a little bit more. And just for fun, we're gonna add so
me
green food-coloring. Next, I'm gonna
add some vinegar. I want you to watch what happens when we pour the
vinegar into our pumpkin that has baking soda in it. Are you ready to
watch some science? What do you see happening? Oh, wasn't that so cool? Let's watch it again,
but slowed down. I want you to see
what's happening when those two
substances mix together. We're mixing baking
soda and vinegar. And when they mix
inside that pumpkin, something really cool happens: they start to react
and crea
te bubbles. Can you see those bubbles when
you watch the video again? (ominous Halloween music) That activity is
a really easy way that you can observe a
chemical reaction at home. You don't actually
need a pumpkin. You can mix the baking soda and vinegar in anything, and you'll see that reaction,
which is so cool to watch. All of those bubbles are forming because those two things
are reacting together, and so it's really fun to
watch how quickly it reacts, or how many bubbles happen, when you u
se different
amounts of materials, so hopefully it's something
you can try out at home. Today, we learned a
lot about pumpkins. We got to look inside and see what's inside
different types of pumpkins: bigger, smaller,
different colors. And we even learned a little
bit about how pumpkins grow. They start off as
just this small seed, and eventually turn
into giant pumpkins. These ones we had today
are even pretty small compared to some of the
bigger-sized pumpkins that maybe you've seen
in a pumpk
in patch or at a home or at
the grocery store. Plants make seeds in
order to continue to grow. And so if you're ever wanting
to make your own pumpkins, all you have to do is
plant some of these seeds. They need water,
they need sunlight, and they need the
air in order to grow. So, some people like
to save the seeds and plant them so that new
ones will grow next fall. Some people like
to take the seeds and make yummy
recipes out of them, or even make
pumpkin-flavored recipes from the insides of
t
he actual pumpkins. There's so much that you
can do with pumpkins, and so much science
to learn about. We always talk about
how important it is to make observations
and ask questions. And I love when
the season changes, because there's so many
new things around us that we can notice
and wonder about. We see new plants, like
pumpkins in the fall. We see things happening
outside, like leaves changing. And there's so many
learning opportunities every time the world
around us is changing. Because th
at's
what scientists do. They learn about and
try to make sense of the world around us. So as always, while you're outside enjoying
the lovely fall weather, whether it's in your backyard
or around the neighborhood, stay curious, ask questions, make observations about
those things around you, and maybe you can
learn so much more about the world around
us through science. Thanks for joining me today, and I hope to see you next time. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Teaching in
Room 9 is made possible w
ith support of Bank of America, Dana Brown Charitable Trust, Emerson, and viewers like you. (upbeat music)
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