Southdown Students Have Fun at Harvest Festival

Elementary grade level students all around Huntington UFSD celebrated at recent harvest festivals, which were a reminder of the community’s agricultural roots. The fun extended to the northwest corner of the district at Southdown Primary School where there was plenty of excitement to go around.

On Halloween, students enjoyed the annual Southdown Harvest Festival with a pumpkin patch, sing-a-long hayride, an interactive story and a graveyard scavenger hunt.

After picking pumpkins, second graders in teachers’ Dana Hartough and Theresa Duffy’s class dissected pumpkins last Friday. “The students used their senses to describe the inside of the pumpkin to use in a writing activity, they also incorporated math and science,” Ms. Hartough said. With the pumpkin seeds, they built math arrays and wrote repeated addition sentences to describe the amount of pumpkin seeds inside the pumpkin. The students used the pumpkin theme to connect with the Science unit, Diversity of Life. A lot of learning happened utilizing the pumpkins!”

Naturally students enjoyed combining learning and fun. “Our students loved dissecting the pumpkin and using it as a writing and math activity,” Ms. Duffy said.

Once part of the Gold Coast estate of pharmaceutical titan George McKesson Brown, Southdown’s grounds came to life for the harvest festival.