Jack-O-Lantern

Halloween ( Hantu festival in U.S) is coming, this year, I decided to make a Jack-O-Lantern to show the festive mood. I being teaching Evan how to sing the Jack-O-Lantern song, coloring the pumpkin, counting the pumpkins but I think the best way to reinforce his knowledge on the pumpkin is to show him the real one. Ethan being begging me to make one Jack-o-Lantern for him since last week after we read a story book about Halloween.

The song we being singing during the carving process:

Jack-o-lantern! Jack-o-lantern! Big and Yellow!
Jack-o-lantern! Jack-o-lantern! Funny Fellow!
Shinning in the night,
With your candle light,
Scarring out the people,
with the BOO! BOO! BOO!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-WsJ4cHHEo
I finally buy a pumpkin today, a big one! A little big afraid that I could not carve the hard shell of the pumpkin. Ethan helped me chose a big round pumpkin.

I found some instruction online through YOUTUBE about how to carve the pumpkin. First, I had to cut off the top part of the pumpkin to get all the pulp inside including the seeds.




The two kids are ready to scoop out the pulp by holding the spoons waiting for me to cut off the top part. But when they saw the inside of the pumpkin with those sticky pulp, they just ran off immediately and left me alone scooping out the pulp and seeds.



After cleaning the inside, we had to decide which Jack O Lantern face we will be carving. Eric found some ideas online, Ethan drew some funny faces and then we chose our best choice of face.

I then drew the face on the pumpkin by using marker. I used the steak knife to carve it out the outline of the face carefully. I thought it was hard but actually not. The whole carving process only took about 45 minutes including cleaning out the inside, drawing, carving and cleaning.


Finally , we got out Jack-O-Lantern lighting out at night. BOO! BOO! BOO!