Pumpkin and a Book 2010

This year's Pumpkin and a Book is in the books! And guess what?......

WE WON!!!!!

By "we", of course I mean Carlie's 3rd grade class!

This year the class chose the book "The Old Willis Place". If you've never read it, you should! It is a great read....even for adults! It's definitely not a book for little children.

The book is about an old estate that is said to be haunted by the ghost of Miss Lillian Willis who died in the parlor of the house. She left the estate to the county. The county hires caretaker after caretaker to live in a trailer on the property behind the house. The story starts with a new caretaker, Mr. Morrison and his 12 year old daughter, Lissa, moving onto the property.

The story is told from the perspective of a young girl named Diana who lives on the property with her brother Georgie. You learn that Diana and Georgie are orphans who live in a small shed in the woods.......but that's not all........

Of course I'm not going to spoil the story! You'll have to read it!!!

The class voted to do a pumpkin to look like "Georgie". We narrowed it down to doing Georgie from a scene where he comes running out of the woods wearing nothing but a loincloth, with red and yellow mud from the creek as war paint on his face and body. He had wild tangled dirty hair, with leaves, mud, and hawk feathers sticking out. We also created his bear, Alfie, out of two small pumpkins and foam sheets.

Here's a look.....

We used two pumpkins for each of the characters. For Georgie (the boy) we mixed a few colors to come up with his pale skin tone, and the war paint colors. The kids painted the war paint on him with their fingers. I cut the loincloth our of a suede fabric scrap I had already. For Alfie (the stuffed bear), we used two small pumpkins, and traced his arms and legs, and ears out of brown foam sheets. We used a toothpick dipped in white paint to make "stitching" around his "seams". Everything is held together with hot glue!

A view of Georgie's hair. Lawd, we spent most of ourtime on this wig! It was originally a girl's long curly white Halloween costume wig. I cut it off to look like a long haired boy. But we took this wig out on the playground and scrubbed it in 3 different types of dirt! We teased it with a comb to make tangles. Then we stuck hay, grass, sticks, and fallen leaves all in it! To top it off we added real chicken feathers to the top!!

His face was drawn by hand. Googly eyes. And to give him some dimension we used crinkled up newspaper molded in the shape of a nose and painted it.

We were all very proud of our creation! When the secretary announced the winners over the PA system, our class yelled so loud and so long, they could be heard outside! Then the teacher had to call another teacher to find out who else placed. The class had yelled through the entire 3rd grade announcement!

Pumpkin and a Book is always our favorite contest! We had a great time working on it!

Oh, and our school auctions these pumpkins off at our Fall Festival! The festival was last night. Carlie was determined to have it. So we bid on him. And WE WON!!!

So Georgie is coming home today to live with us! And Carlie says we are making his sister "Diana" over Fall Break.....which starts TODAY!!!!

WooHoo!!!!!!!! No school for 9 days!!!! I love it!

Happy Fall Y'all!