Pumpkins are a kind of squash. For a very long time, many Native American peoples, including the Haudenosaunee, have planted squash together with corn and beans. They call these plants the Three Sisters, because they grow best together and help each other.

A pumpkin has a hard outside, but what's inside? Under the skin, called the rind, is the thick orange part we eat, called the flesh. In the middle is the stringy pulp and lots and lots of seeds.

H is our eighth letter! It makes an /h/ sound at the start of words like horse, house, hat and honeydew. To make it, open your mouth and breathe out, like you're fogging up a window.

We've counted up to 7. Today we add one more and get 8. Eight is five fingers on one hand plus three on the other. A spider has 8 legs, and you can draw an 8 like a snowman: one circle on top of another!

Spiders make webs by crossing lines of silk. People weave cloth the same way: one line goes over, the next goes under. In Ghana, in West Africa, there's a famous story that weavers learned to make beautiful kente cloth by watching a spider spin its web.

Spiders are helpers! Many spiders catch flies, mosquitoes and other bugs that eat our plants or bother us. Gardeners and farmers are happy to see them, because spiders keep pests away without any sprays.

G is our seventh letter! It makes a /g/ sound at the start of words like goat, grapes, gorilla and guitar. To make it, open your mouth a little and make the sound in the back of your throat.

We've counted up to 6. Today we add one more and get 7. Seven is five fingers on one hand plus two on the other. It's also how many days are in a week: count them from Monday to Sunday!

A farm is full of textures. Wool is fluffy, feathers are soft, straw is scratchy and wood is rough. Artists recreate those textures with materials you can feel and marks that look the way a thing feels.

A farm is full of heavy things: hay bales, buckets of water, bags of feed and big pumpkins. Farmers can't carry it all in their arms, so they use helpers. A wheelbarrow rolls a heavy load on one wheel. A tractor pulls a wagon full of hay. Rolling is much easier than dragging!

F is our sixth letter! It makes a soft, windy /f/ sound at the start of words like fish, frog, fox and farm. To make it, rest your top teeth on your bottom lip and blow.

We've counted up to 5. Today we add one more and get 6. Six is the first number that needs two hands: all five fingers on one hand, plus one finger on the other. On the farm, six is easy to spot. Half a carton of eggs is six eggs!

No person ever saw a living dinosaur. So how do we know what they looked like? Scientists called paleontologists act like detectives. Bones show a dinosaur's shape and size. Fossil footprints show how it walked, and even how tall it was. Rare skin prints show scales, and some fossils even show feath

When kids think of dinosaurs, they think BIG. And some were! The biggest ones, called titanosaurs, were longer than three school buses and heavier than ten elephants. But not every dinosaur was a giant. Some were only about the size of a chicken. Tyrannosaurus rex was somewhere in between: about as

E is our fifth letter! It makes a short /e/ sound at the start of words like egg, elephant and elf. Sometimes E says its own name, too, like in "eat." For now, we're listening for /e/.

We've counted up to 4. Today we add one more and get 5. Five is the easiest number to carry around, because it's right on your hand: five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.

Our noses can take us on a trip! People around the world use spices and herbs that smell wonderful: cinnamon, ginger, cumin, basil, vanilla and many more. The smells in your kitchen might remind you of family, holidays and favorite meals.

We've spent the week trying each sense. Today we put them together. Before we even see something, our senses can give us clues: we smell cookies baking, we hear the bath running, we feel rain on our skin. Each clue helps us figure out what's happening.

Today we're learning D. For toddlers the goal isn't writing it. It's hearing the /d/ sound at the start of words like dog, duck and dad, and connecting it to the shape of D: a straight line and a big curve.

We've met 1, 2 and 3. Today we add one more and get 4. Four is easy to spot once you start looking: four legs on a dog, four wheels on a car and four corners on a square.