Place a variety of gourds in your science center. Encourage students to examine the gourds and use descriptive words, such as bumpy, smooth, large, thin, round, green, yellow or brown. They can also practice the age-appropriate science concept of categorization by sorting the gourds into piles. That might mean sorting by color, making one pile of bumpy gourds and another of smooth gourds, or making several piles based on the gourds' shapes.
Let your students explore different types of corn, such as popcorn, Indian corn, sweet corn and even candy corn. Ask children to predict what will happen to each type of corn if you plant it in soil and water it. Some students may believe that the candy corn will grow as well! For an easier growing demonstration, put an ear of Indian corn in a pie tin filled with water. Your students will eventually be able to see the kernels of corn grow while still attached to the ear.
Students may have no idea that in the Pilgrims' time, people had to make many foods by hand. Let them churn butter, just as the Pilgrims used to. Explain to students that whole milk and cream are made from fat mixed with liquid milk. Then let each child shake a small jar half filled with cream until butter forms. This will help them better understand how dissolved substances, mixtures and emulsifications work.
It is said that Squanto helped the Pilgrims when they came to the New World by teaching them planting techniques they could use in Plymouth. For example, he taught how to convert fish into fertilizer, since fish were plentiful in the area. You can bring this concept to life by buying "fish emulsion," which you can buy at any garden nursery. Conduct an experiment with students in which they plant two groups of seeds, some that they water and care for normally, and some that they add fish emulsion to. Suggest that they guess -- hypothesize -- what will happen, show them how to take basic measurements as the plants begin to grow, and record the data for them to look at. Although they'll need a lot of hand-holding for this experiment, it will give them a taste of how the scientific method works.