Mentor Text- The Legend of Spookly the Square Pumpkin

I have been a bad blogger...school and life have consumed my life and I have not been able to sit and write a blog in a while.  I think of all these good ideas, but it usually it is when I am in my car driving back and forth to school.  This year I am having a huge commute to school each day, which hasn't been terrible, but some of my car time would be blogging time normally.  Please forgive me for maybe not as many blog posts.  I am hoping to break 200 followers very soon because I have an awesome giveaway that I have been waiting to do...I only need 8 more followers!

Today, I am linking up with the fabulous girls at Collaboration Cuties for their weekly Mentor Text linky party.  If you have not checked this out yet, you should.  I find some many great books that I did not know about before or have forgotten about. They have this party each Sunday and it is fabulous!!!  This week their theme is October books, fall or Halloween.  I teach in a Christian school so we do not celebrate Halloween.  I like to do a bunch of fall activities with the students.  I usually have a pumpkin day where we do many different activities with pumpkins and math.  

We guess how many seeds are in a pumpkin.  Then we dig in and see how many there actually are.  The students are always surprised at how many seeds are in a pumpkin.

The students work in groups to put the seeds in groups of ten.

Some students didn't want to touch the actual stuff inside so they used gloves!

We guessed how many were in this small pumpkin and the students were amazed that there were over 100 seeds inside this little pumpkin.

Some groups were neater than others with their grouping!

After we complete a bunch of math activity, I always read The Legend of Spookly the Square Pumpkin by Joe Troiano.  I use this story to talk about how God made us all different.  We should not look at peoples outward appearance, but look at their heart.  We then usually draw our own Spookly pumpkin and write about how God made us each different.

Description from Barnes & Nobles.com: 

One day in the pumpkin patch
the strangest little pumpkin hatched....

Spookley the Pumpkin was different. All the other pumpkins teased him, until Spookley proved that being different can save the day!

I also found a fantastic video of the book on youtube.  

Check out this very inspiring book!  Well, I am off to do some fall baking and finish some school work for the week!  

Rosie