QUESTION: Does Mrs. Miller really count all the seeds in the pumpkin?
ANSWER: Absolutely, YES!! And here’s how she does it:
- 1. First, she cuts the top off the pumpkin and gets all her materials ready: Spoon, wax paper, flashlight, and paper towels because her hands get really messy and slippery.
2. Second, she takes all the seeds out of the pumpkin using her hands and the spoon. She checks the inside of the pumpkin with the flashlight to make sure she got all the seeds out.
3. Third, she counts the seeds, putting them into piles of 25. She uses piles of 25 so that if she is interrupted (or forgets what she counted) it’s easy to go back and count the last pile.
4. After she counts the last seeds, she knows how many were inside the pumpkin. Her last thing to do is look through all the guesses made by children and find the closest one or ones. This year there were 817 seeds in the pumpkin. The guesses ranged from “1 big fat seed” to
10 billion.
London, age 8, guessed 808 seeds. She was the closest and is the winner of the contest. Congratulations, London!
Doreen M.
