News
An education through the pumpkin patch
Scott Wagar
10/29/2013
Each year when Halloween comes along at Central School, first grade teacher, Codi Rybchinski, brings together her first grade class, some Lumberjack hockey players and a lot of pumpkins. When she mixes this all together she comes up with an important event to the minds of her young scholars, “Teaming up with Reading,” which is an educational event that focuses on the importance of literature.
“I have invited the Lumberjack hockey players into my room for the past four years. In first grade, it’s so important to absorb as many stories as possible, whether the stories are read to the children, or the children read them,” Rybchinski said. “First grade is usually the grade that students learn to read.”
“My husband, Travis, and I were visiting a few years back, and he wanted to have his players do some type of a community service project with youth. I wanted to have a day where I invited people in to spend some time and read with my students. We came up with ‘Teaming up with Reading.’
“I feel it is very important for my students to team up with a buddy and I feel it’s important for these young men to learn what it means to get involved in a community,” Cody Rybchinski continued.
“I know my students love it every year, and I know the hockey players have a fun time spending time with my students. Growing up my parents, along with so many other families, we started carving pumpkins as a tradition, and now Travis and I do the same with our children. I guess I wanted to continue that tradition with my students as well.”
For Rybchinski and her first grade class, “Teaming up with Reading” is an all day event of learning, which surrounds an important cultivar of squash that has a rather odd sounding and funny name, Cucurbita pepo, or, what Charles Schulz called The Great Pumpkin.
“Every time I do this event, I plan most of the day specifically on pumpkins. So, we cover our reading, science and math with one item, the pumpkin. This year we worked on the ‘Pumpkin Investigation’ in the morning where we describe the outside of the pumpkin and we count to see how many lines each pumpkin had, with the highest number being 22 lines this year.”
“We then do the ‘Life Cycle of a Pumpkin’ where we learn how pumpkins start to grow and how big they can end up,” Codi Rybchinski said. “After lunch, the hockey players came to the classroom along with Tim Schroeder, who is our official ‘Class Grampa.’ The players read their books to their small groups and Tim gets a head start on preparing the pumpkins for carving.
“After the stories, we start gutting out the pumpkins and the ‘ewwwws’ and ‘gross’ start to come out of my students, which makes us all giggle,” Rybchinski said. “At the end of the day, we took out our unifix cubes and measured the width and height of the pumpkins.”
Once the pumpkins become jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween, Rybchinski and her students collect all the pumpkin seeds and Rybchinski then takes the seeds home with her where she spends the evening roasting the seeds and the next day she holds a pumpkin seed activity and gives the students the opportunity to taste the pumpkin seeds.
This year, Todd Renae, a forward for the Lumberjacks’ hockey team; along with Ryan Miner, goaltender and Ethan Hicks, defenseman for the Jacks came to Rybchinski’s class and assisted her in reading five different books about pumpkins to the children.
The Lumberjacks also assisted Schroeder in helping the kids create their own unique jack-o’-laterns and spent the afternoon interacting with the students talking about pumpkins, hockey and how to get the insides of the pumpkins off their hands.
Coach Travis Rybchinski said that volunteering is an important part of his players education at Dakota College at Bottineau.
“It is good for us to help out in the community in many ways. It makes the guys feel good about contributing to society and meeting new people. Doing an activity may help a student-athlete make a career decision because of what they volunteered for, maybe in this situation they enjoy working with children so much they may want to be a teacher,” Travis Rybchinski said.
“It also is good to get guys out of their comfort zone because it gives them more confidence. It also helps them realize that they are role models for the youth in this community and they need to be responsible both on and off the ice. Sometimes the work is hard but in the end I hope they get a good experience out of it.”
So far this school year, the men’s hockey team has volunteered to assist in over 20 organizations in a variety of work and helping others.
In the end, “Teaming up with Reading” was not only a great learning experience, but a fun experience for everyone involved.