(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 like 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 here, 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 explore 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 decoration 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?

They'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 continue 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 still 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 other 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 differences.

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 bigger 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 grow.

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 from 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 those 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 with 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 some 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 create 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 use 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 pumpkin 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 the 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 that'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 with support of Bank of America, Dana Brown Charitable Trust, Emerson, and viewers like you.

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