There are a whole bunch of watermelon activities for you and your favorite kids or adults to do! For instance, you can make it a learning experience for everyone by estimating the circumference of a watermelon. Then you can give a prize to the winner. How do you measure the circumference easily? Take a string and wrap it around the midpoint and then measure that with a ruler. Why not estimate the other dimension? Give a second prize for the length of that same watermelon!
Another favorite among watermelon activities is predicting the number of seeds in either the whole watermelon OR a particular slice of watermelon! If you have each person who gets a slice of watermelon give it a critical eye and then guess the total number in that slice--even if they count the ones they can see!--you can get some fun out of the eventual 'correct' guess and award a prize accordingly!
To teach your kids (and you!) how to judge distances, another of our favorite watermelon activities is to have yourself a watermelon spitting contest! Have everyone save ONE seed from their slice of watermelon and then head toward a starting line. As each person spits a seed, have them guess the distance it is from the starting line to where it lands. The winner is the person who guesses the distance best -- NOT the farthest spitter! This gives kids AND adults a fairer playing (or shall we say 'spitting') field!
And all the while, one of the watermelon activities that is fun is making up additional lyrics to the Watermelon Song (sung to the tune of Clementine) as provided on www.prekfun.com:
Watermelon, watermelon,
Such a juicy summer treat
Seeds for spitting
What a fitting
Snack to take outside to eat!
And for your eating pleasure, www.watermelon.org has a recipe for your watermelon activities: