Pumpkins and 5 senses

I wanted to do a 5 senses pumpkin activity with Turbo for weeks. This week we finally had time!

While Turbo was napping, I put our workmat on the kitchen floor with the pumpkin in the middle. When we came down he was immediately interested. "why is the pumpkin there, what are we doing, why is the desk on the play mat...."

We sat next to the pumpkin, I told him he had 5 senses and asked if he wanted to use them. I played a guessing game to introduce the senses.  "Ok, here's number one, can you guess what it is?" Then point to my ear. Of course he said ear and I said, "Yes, and the ear hears things. Hearing is a sense."  We did all five very quickly.

Then we went through the 5 senses while exploring the outside of our pumpkin.  For instance, I asked him to touch the pumpkin and how it felt.  If he didn't give an answer right away, I asked leading questions "does it feel smooth, sticky, rough, soft etc." Then he would say yes/no.   I asked him to guess what it tasted like since I didn't want him licking the outside of the pumpkin.

His answers:
TOUCH: Smooth, soft*, hard, bumpy, heavy. Stem was rough and poky
SMELL: good and dirty (um, ok)
HEARING: quiet and butter (I'm at a loss on that one)
SIGHT: round and orange
TASTE: he projected it would taste sweet.
 * I made a mental note to explain the difference between smooth and soft as he described pumpkin skin as both. 

After his exploration and a good game of Pumpkin rolling, I asked what he thought was inside it.  He said toys! To show me he got a little toy and put the pumpkin on top.

After carving it open, Turbo pulled off the top and said "There are SEEDS, Lots and lots of seeds. Toys, nope."

He spent TONS of time scooping out seeds!  When he was done with scooping out, he scooped them back in. 

Then we talked about the 5 senses again for the inside of the pumpkin:
TOUCH: Slimy (this was his word, he said it so matter of factually)
SMELL: Good
Hearing: Quiet
Sight: Messy
Taste: Yummy. I gave him a very tiny sliver of raw pumpkin.

Carving a pumpkin face isn't something I wanted my 2 year old doing. Since things work out better on activities where he's the primary doer and I'm the observer, we saved that for next year.  I gave him a marker and he was happy as could be!!  He also learned about smearing. 

Good thing I waited until we had time. We spent 75 minutes on this one! Seriously, we've never ever spent this long on any single themed activity before.  I even ended it before he was showing signs of being done.  Got to love Open Ended toys!!