Plant Life Cycle: Pumpkins!

Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling

• Read the story while pausing to note what happens to the tiny seed during each stage of its journey.
• After reading the story, summarize the growing stages of the tiny seed.
• Explain that many plants begin and end in similar ways.
• Explain that a cycle is something that repeats over and over again.
• Explain that a life cycle of a plant is when something begins with a seed, grows into a plant and then makes more seeds.
• Load the How Pumpkins Grow video, or print and use the pdf version to display to your class.
• If time allows, you may want to show the video Peep and the Big Wide World: Peep Plants a Seed.

Guided Practice

• Hand out the Pumpkin Life Cycle worksheet.
• Tell your students to sit in a circle with the worksheet on the floor in front of them.
• Tell your students that they will be cutting out the pictures and gluing them in the correct order on the worksheet.
• Go around the circle of students to give every student a chance to describe a picture and where it will fall in the pumpkin life cycle.
• Continue this practice by telling your students to point out the pictures from first through last in the cycle.

Independent working time

• Instruct your students to cut the pictures out and glue them in the correct places.
• Tell your students to lay out all of the pictures first before gluing!
• Dismiss your students to work in their table spots.
• Go to each student as they finish and ask them to describe the parts of the cycle on their worksheet.