#91 - Pumpkins, Patience, and Parenting: Lessons from Fall

In this episode, Jesús and I are diving into the world of pumpkins—and trust me, it’s more than just carving jack-o'-lanterns. As we chat about roasting seeds, exploring pumpkin patches, and noticing how growth takes time, we reflect on the little ways homeschooling helps us slow down and savor these moments. We want parents, especially those just starting out, to see that you don’t need to know everything to homeschool well—learning happens in the simple, everyday activities. Whether it’s scooping seeds, making a pie, or having meaningful conversations, we’re building memories that matter. Download our fall unit study by texting "pumpkin" to 850-750-9575 and join us in making this season fun and meaningful with your kids! :), Monica
#HomeschoolUnlocked #FallLearning #PumpkinAdventures #HandsOnLearning #HomeschoolJourney #SeasonalEducation #FamilyActivities #LearningThroughPlay #ParentingWithPurpose #GodisGood

https://1lnk.page/MonicaAviles

Transcript

Welcome to the Homeschool Unlocked podcast, the show that helps parents see homeschooling as a unique opportunity. So forget fear, you can inspire, you can guide your child. Homeschool Unlocked, it's not school, it's life.Well, Homeschool Unlocked family, here we go. This is episode 91. I know I might seem super excited to be here today.I am. I am. We've broken the nine decade mark.I don't think that really makes sense. But this is episode 91. This is Jesus Aviles.I am one of two of your Homeschool Unlocked hosts. This is my queen. I'm Monica, and we are so glad to be talking about pumpkins today.Let's do it. Let's do it. Pumpkins.Talk to me about it, my love. All right, we're going to start our episode off with some true and false questions. So honey, pumpkins can grow as big as a small car.True or false? Oh, I like, you know why I like these pumpkin questions? Because being from Miami, I'm surrounded by pumpkins. Are you? I'm absolutely not. I know zero about pumpkins.Aside from pumpkin pie, my dad, super duper baker all his life, make very good pumpkin pie. Okay, so I'm going to dig into my dad pumpkin pie file, and I'm going to try to answer these pumpkin questions the best possible. Give it to me.Give it to me. Well, true or false about the car? Pumpkins can come as big as a car? Yes. Absolutely not.No way, Jose. Actually, some pumpkins can grow to over 1,000 pounds, which are big enough to win contests. So yes.What do you do with all that? I make a lot of pumpkin pie. That is a lot. Or pumpkin juice.That pumpkin juice. It gets taken to Hogwarts. It gets taken to Hogwarts.All right, true or false? Pumpkin seeds can be roasted and eaten as a snack. Yes, that's absolutely true. I've actually seen that.Yes, that is absolutely true. Pumpkins are mostly water. True or false? Pumpkins are mostly water.I think they're mostly hollow. Mostly water, like watery. Yeah, they are kind of, they're kind of mushy, I guess.Okay, it's true or false? True. You are correct. Yes, they're about 90% water.Really? So yep, they are. And now is a great time. You can roast some pumpkin seeds.I like it, I like it. Now our fall unit study, if you have not downloaded, is still available. All you have to do is text the word pumpkin, no S, singular pumpkin, to 850-750-9575.Beep, beep, beep, beep. That's me, I'm pretending I'm calling right now. You're already on my, you're already on speed dial for me.Let's do it. So we want to talk about pumpkins because it's such a great way to take an ordinary thing and learn more and do more with it. Honey, as we're talking about pumpkins, can you just maybe spend a little time, make a connection about something that you have had to wait for? Like, you know, pumpkin came from a seed, which we talked about last week.Can you think of a time when you had to wait for something and then tell us about that? How did it feel to wait and was it worth it in the end? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, I got something very vivid in my mind that I had to wait for. And I think at the beginning, you don't want to wait.And then somehow, some way, the Lord just kind of just, you know, kind of just reminds you of the virtue of waiting. And then now you're in that space where it's you and the Lord, because waiting can get pretty lonely, I think. You know, your mind can wander, you can fill it with stuff.But let's just say you wait, but it's a focused wait. You wait because you're waiting for a thing, not just, you know, we're waiting, so I'm going to occupy myself with some other things, right? So that waiting that I recall was, at the beginning, a little nerve-wracking, a little scared, super exciting. And this thing that I was waiting for happened.It was fantastic. It was super fantastic. Okay, drumroll.Drumroll. Oh, now you want to know it? Yeah, I want to know it. Oh, this, I was thinking of our wedding.I was thinking of you coming in. I was like super nervous and scared. And I was like, well, let me focus.Let me try to distract myself by trying to play another game of wiffle ball with my buddies or going to throw the football around. No, you're just going to wait. You're going to enjoy, going to think about you.And so that was something where... You're talking about on our wedding day? On our wedding day, when you came in through the, when you came in through the church. Yeah. Yep.I waited. It was, it was, it was, um, you know, there are so many things with, in life where it's just a seed. It's a little thought.Yeah. And the power of that thought is like a little seed that can grow in our mind. And if it's a good thought, if it's a good seed, then it will yield good things.If it's a thought, you know, I think with being a Christian, it's not one thing that we start to learn. It's not the big things that are necessarily growing in our mind. It's not the desire to go out and, and steal or, or, you know, something along those lines, but even fear or doubt, anxiety, those are still bad thoughts.Those are bad seeds. They result in things like tension or increased heart rate, you know, cortisol levels going up. And instead we, we take out, we replace that.You don't just pull out the weed. You put in something new, which would be a beautiful thought. Yeah.Yeah. So, I mean, if you go back to that concept of, of the seeds and waiting and waiting for it to grow, you know, I mean, I just, this is probably not an episode to talk about, you know, the fruits and benefits of receiving premarital counseling, but that really helped, you know, the whole concept of getting that whole soil ready. So that when Monica came and she became that beautiful pumpkin seed, she became a pumpkin.Just, just lots of fruit after that. Yeah, absolutely. And when you are spending time with your child, enjoying that pumpkin, take time to do something different with those seeds.If you haven't done this before, you can actually get those pumpkin seeds and with your hands, just remove the pulp, right? Let, let your children feel that texture. They can wear gloves or not, but rinse the seeds. Then let them, you know, pat them dry, let them air dry, be ready for you to be able to actually season them.So after they dry, you can go and you can season them. You can put some olive oil or butter, salt, pepper, maybe something else. Is this how you bake seeds? And then roast them just very low heat for about 20 to 30 minutes.Let them cool and enjoy them. If that sounds like too much work, you could also just put them in some dirt, let them sprout and feed them to your chickens afterward. Okay.I will say, I mean, just in you describing the task, you know, one of the beautiful things about homeschooling, you know, what's beautiful about trying to educate kids is really try to get so many, you're trying to get so many senses involved, right? When, when a kid learns, he just doesn't learn auditorily, right? So for those of us that think homeschooling is just a parent speaking to a kid, that just involves one, one sense. But in this particular case, it sounds like in the activities that you've created, we get a chance to, you know, you get to touch stuff, slimy stuff, wet stuff. You get to smell stuff.So you got that sense, you got the tactile, you got the, what's it called for the nose? Olfactory. Olfactory senses. And you got the visual senses because you're seeing things, you got auditory senses coming in, right? And in this particular case, it could almost be looked at developmentally where, not even developmentally, but you can see the progress in something where, hey, let's look at this whole cycle again.When you pull out the seed, you grow it back up and here's the next pumpkin. And so all of a sudden, this lesson can go all over the place. Yeah.You sit there and draw the seed, draw it after it starts to sprout. You can even, even before you cut your pumpkin open, try to guess whose pumpkin is going to have more seeds. Notice, come to find out as an adult that the ridges on the pumpkin affect how many seeds are in it.And so you can have your children look at that, guess which pumpkin's going to have more. Where are these seeds located? Why would this pumpkin have fewer seeds? What's the difference? You could do percentage, right? Like actually looking at the pumpkin, weighing it. And then after you scoop out the pumpkin, weigh it again.That sounds like a great science experiment. Yeah. It has to do with math.We want you to see that there is so much learning that can take place with an ordinary activity. You don't have to rush through these activities. You don't have to necessarily have a structured curriculum for every single thing that you do.If you start and wonder and ask questions and have conversations with your children, even pumpkins take on a whole new meaning, like in Cinderella. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A whole new life.A whole new function. And right when you were thinking about that, obviously we are talking about doing something with the pumpkin seeds, but then you have the pumpkin itself, right? I mean, we talked about pumpkin pies, I believe, in the first episode. I mean, last episode.Yeah. And so all of a sudden, and you could also go carving, right? We're in that season, right? The weather's dropped here two to three days ago. We're here in Tallahassee, Florida, our capital in Florida.Temperature has dropped. It feels very pumpkin-y. You're beginning to see folks that have carved pumpkins out, both in the sense where they've carved the outside of it and some where they've kind of cut it completely out, right? Where you put candles inside like that.I've never really done any of that before, but I've always been fascinated by it. Yep. There's a lot that you can enjoy with your children in this fall season.Enjoy times when you go out and enjoy activities in your home too. We're here to support you. Text the word pumpkin to 850-750-9575 and enjoy.We've been homeschooling for over 20 years and we're here to help you find the beauty in it as well. And if I can add to that, you know, as with my school psychology background, I mean, pumpkins and watching things grow and going through this particular process, you're building, I think, one of the top skillsets that are often, you know, overlooked or maybe not overlooked, but definitely addressed a little too late in my opinion. And this is this whole concept of sustained attention, right? Hey, let's focus.Let's focus here on this, right? You're putting aside the phones, you're putting aside a couple of different things. I would even suggest, you know, if for those that maybe have like a fine motor issues, right? That maybe can't draw, maybe they could be the photographers. Maybe you could record it in slow motion.I'm just trying to think of the multiple ways we can use this activity and the whole fascination of from seed to growth. And then from the growth inside, it has the seeds. I mean, that whole cycle, you can, you can eat it, you can touch it.It's all slimy. You can create some stuff. I'm just, I'm just fascinated with the amount of things that are possible just by simply grabbing a pumpkin and doing some stuff.Monica has been providing the phone number and this phone number will begin a process that's going to get you like she had mentioned before these lesson plans, but you only need to call it once. You only need to call it once because once you get it, you're going to get four weeks worth of lesson plans, right? You're going to get four weeks, one involving clay, one involving seeds, one involving pumpkins. And the fourth one, I can't quite tell you, you have to join us next episode.And they are, it is a unit study. So there are discussion topics, there's ideas, there's activities, books. They're not lesson plans in the same way.No, no, no. I know that's your background, but I just want to clarify that. There you go.Go get it. Call that number. Text.Text the number. Don't call that number. Nobody will be picking up.Text that number. Have a wonderful week. We love you so much.Knock, knock. Who's there? Pumpkin. Pumpkin who? Pumpkin later.No, we'll delete that. Thank you for spending time with us today. Check out our link below and subscribe to our podcast.We hope that we helped you by unlocking a new way of seeing homeschooling. Who else needs to hear this? Only you know. So take action and share it.Because remember, homeschool unlocked. It's not school. It's life.