Happy Halloween! Here at Apple Corps, we strive to promote healthy eating and physical activity in the schools we work with – Concord International Elementary and Emerson Elementary. Besides cooking up delicious food in our bi-weekly nutrition classes, we also encourage and plan alternative celebrations during the traditionally candy-heavy holidays of Halloween and Valentine’s Day.

At Concord this year, we  decided to honor Harvest’s iconic vegetable through the celebration of Pumpkin Games in students’ P.E. classes. Students played Pumpkin in the Pumpkin Patch (sharks and minnows), balanced pumpkins on their head in relay races, and even estimated the weight of a giant pumpkin and guessed the number of pumpkin seeds. Students with the most accurate estimations won sugar pumpkins, ready for home cooking with a pumpkin soup recipe attached to their stem. None of these awesome activities would have been possible without the collaboration and ideas from

Concord’s fabulous P.E. teacher!

Our school winners, two first-graders, guessed the weight exactly of the giant pumpkin (108 pounds) and were 11 seeds away from exact number of pumpkin seeds (1231). Congrats!

After the grand finale of Pumpkin Games on Friday afternoon with a class of 30 Kindergarten students wearing pajama costumes, it was clear there were two main take-aways from Pumpkin Games:

• It is easy, and sooo fun, to incorporate physical activity and even math into Halloween festivities.
• If you use hair gel, you will be able to balance a small pumpkin on your head with ease.