How Many Seeds In a Pumpkin? (review)

When Mr. Tiffin lays out three pumpkins and challenges students to guess which has the most seeds, tall Robert naturally chooses the biggest, and short Charlie the smallest. There's only one sure way to find out, and soon the class is garbed for messy action, disemboweling pumpkins atop newspaper, collecting the guts in pails, and ready to count seeds the next day. Three teams group the seeds of their assigned pumpkin by twos, fives, and tens, and—wouldn't you know it—the smallest pumpkin has the most. Mr. Tiffin's not done yet, though: why guess when you can predict? And so the class compares features of the three pumpkins and determines that more ridges indicate more seeds. This is just the sort of inviting activity to get teachers thinking, "We could do that," and Karas' enthusiastic, organized, and remarkably neat crew of round-headed urchins make it look pretty easy (veteran teachers will recognize that Mr. Tiffin's cleaning and roasting those seeds on his own time, and that it's a heckuva miraculous class that can keep the seeds on the newspapers and activity table, not on the floor). Still, hands-on learning is the way to go, and any class that hears this book will want to try out the experiment. So be extra nice to the custodian, and dive right in.