KG students inspect the enormous pumpkins in our school garden

From growing pumpkins to creating art

The ArtsPrimary
06-11-2025

From growing pumpkins in our school garden to pumpkin inspired art in the PYP visual arts lessons. A perfect example of student agency, where student curiousity leads to them choosing their own learning path.  

By Sacha Sukasam, Primary Visual Arts Teacher

For the past couple of weeks, our kindergarten classes have been preparing for spooky season at ISU. Our lessons started off in the school garden where we had a chance to inspect how much the pumpkins had grown since last May. To our surprise, not only have the pumpkins have doubled in size; they have become absolutely ENORMOUS!

As Halloween approaches, the demand to cut off the pumpkins ran high among the younger students. So once again we headed to our garden and harvested the biggest pumpkin in our patch and carefully placed it in our art class where it will inspire our coming projects.


Mosaic pumpkins

Kindergarteners got a chance to work on their fine motor skills by creating their own mosaic pumpkin using yellow and orange pieces of paper on black paper. Meanwhile, grade 5 learned about the world-renowned artist Yayoi Kusama whose work centers around her fascination with dots and pumpkins.


Papier-mâché

Now the grade 5's are faced with a challenge to create their own pumpkin inspired by Kusama's art. Through trial and error, we finally came up with a strong enough structure to start papier-mâché. Please stay tuned on how the pumpkins will come out!