Now, I like pumpkins. I like pumpkin chocolate muffins. I like pumpkin pie. I like that Cinderella's pumpkin turns into a carriage. Most of all, I like how if you spell pumpkin six or seven times as I just have, it stops looking like a real word.
Long story short, I see where these second graders are coming from. When I was seven and people were teaching me about bar graphs and spreadsheets, I guess I wouldn't mind learning in the context of a big orange fruit that can also look like a face.
Now, if I were to use spreadsheets in my classroom, I certainly wouldn't be teaching about pumpkins, simply because I'm going to be a music teacher, and I don't necessarily see pumpkins in my lesson plans.
Instead of filling in graphs about how much pumpkins weigh and how many seeds there are, I would use interactive programs to play major scales, and have tables in which the kids had to fill in how many sharps and flats (for younger grades: how many black keys are played). And once they found that information, they could make a bar graph with the key signatures on the bottom (starting with C, then G, then continuing up the circle of fifths), and the amount of sharps going up the left side. That way they not only get a sense of how many sharps in a certain key, they also have a graph they drew to look back on.
I think using spreadsheets is an effective tool in the classroom if you use it right and the students respond well to it. And who knows, I may just put pumpkin stickers on their graphs.
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