Animals, Plants & Seasons 3-minute video · ages 4-8 · free coloring page
How does a tiny seed grow into a giant pumpkin?
A pumpkin seed is smaller than your fingernail. But a pumpkin can be bigger than you! Where does all that pumpkin come from?
3 min
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Free coloring page
The scene from the video as a coloring page, plus the three-sentence answer, the experiment, and a QR code back to this page. One sheet, US Letter, black and white.
The answer in three parts
Why?
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Inside the seed, a baby plant is sleeping, with a little packed lunch.
Someone pokes the seed into warm soil and gives it some water. The water wakes it up! A tiny root pushes down into the soil, and two little green leaves push up into the sunshine.
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The leaves make the plant's own food.
They catch sunlight, and use it to turn air and water into sugar. That sugar builds the whole plant, one tiny bit at a time. A long, twisty vine grows, with big, wide leaves like umbrellas.
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Busy bees help, and the vine feeds the baby pumpkin.
In summer, big yellow flowers open up, and bees carry yellow pollen from flower to flower. Where a bee has brought pollen, a tiny green ball starts to grow under the flower. That's a baby pumpkin! The vine sends it water and sugar every day, and it swells up bigger and bigger.
For grown-ups: From a seed to a ripe pumpkin takes about three or four months, so the pumpkins you see in the fall were planted back in late spring or early summer. Without the bees, there would be no pumpkins. By fall the pumpkin turns from green to bright orange, and inside there are hundreds of brand-new seeds.
From seed to pumpkin
- Seedplanted in late spring
- Sprouta root down
- Vine and flowersin summer
- Orange pumpkinripe in the fall
That takes about three or four months.
A tiny experiment
Try it!
Plant pumpkin seeds
You need: a few pumpkin seeds, a cup of soil, a sunny window, and a grown-up
- Save a few seeds from a pumpkin. Ask a grown-up to help you rinse them.
- Plant them in a cup of soil, near a sunny window.
- Keep the soil damp. In about a week, can you see a little sprout?
What happened? The water wakes up the baby plant sleeping inside each seed.
Did you know?
Some giant pumpkins can grow more than twenty pounds in just one day!
Pumpkin seeds are flat and white, but they are seeds, just like Seedy the watermelon seed!
Your guide in this video
It's me, Seedy! I'm back, to show you how a tiny seed turns into a giant pumpkin.
Seedy is a little black watermelon seed. Pumpkin seeds look different, but they are seeds, just like Seedy!
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