I feel like my life has been overtaken by apples! My class learned about apples the past two weeks, and Chris and I went to an apple orchard this past weekend!
We had the best time learning all about apples and doing all sorts of apple-centered activities! I believe in having a very text rich classroom, so I had lots of apple vocabulary words all around the room. I encourage the kids to use the vocabulary words when they are in the writing center.
The bottom picture shows cards that are actually a part of our curriculum; however, they are from lots of different units so I picked the words that applied best to apples and fall.
We did two fun "craftivities" (love that word, hah!). The first one we completed in the small group that I lead. We read the book Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr. Seuss during large group. The book helps students learn to count to ten as the characters in the book keep stacking apples on top of their heads. We drew "self portraits" and then glued apples one-by-one on top of our heads! We are working hard on one-to-one correspondence!! Some of my higher students wrote the numbers on each apple 1-10.
Our second craftifity were these cute torn-paper apples the kids made. My sweet parapro led this small group. Side note -- One of the things I was most nervous about when I started this job was having a parapro! I thought I may be uncomfortable giving directions to a woman who is over thirty years my senior! Plus, she has been at my school for sixteen years! However, she is WONDERFUL and we get along so, so well! I seriously don't know what I would do without her. So thankful!! Anyway, developing fine motor skills is a very important aspect of Pre-K, so tearing the construction paper to make these apples was the perfect way to practice! We hung some of the apples on a tree my parapro made on our classroom door, and hung the rest in an AB pattern along our board. We are all about patterns right now in Pre-K!
We celebrated the end of our first Apple Week by taste-testing three different types of apples (red, yellow, and green). When we finished tasting the apples, each child chose their favorite and wrote their name on the corresponding dicut apple. We graphed the results!
This little boy couldn't believe how sour the green apple was! His expression was sooo cute and he kept telling me, "It's tangy!!"
Um...how cute is his shirt?! TRUST ME, he is so suave he probably will be prom king one day!
We also made applesauce in the crockpot. We learned the steps involved in making applesauce, which gave us a great opportunity to talk about ordinal numbers. The kids were SO excited about the applesauce, but a few of them ended up not being too crazy about it (probably because it wasn't processed and prepackaged ;))!
Whew! Can't believe we packed all of that into one week. The second week of apples was pretty low-key because we had Monday off and I had training on Tuesday. However, we learned a cute poem about apples (complete with hand motions) and on Friday we had an Apple Party. I put balloons on my bulletin board before the kids came in and you would've thought it was Christmas by their reactions! They loved the balloons so much that I kept them up. One of my little smarties said "That's a pattern!" as soon as he walked in the door. Success! We listened to music and had apple cider, apple cereal, and more apples. Of course, we had to make a graph about the apple cider. Here are a few pictures from Apple Week #2!
Coincidentally, Chris and I had planned to go pumpkin and apple picking right at the end of our apple theme. I definitely regretted not going to the apple orchard before we began our theme because there was so much fun stuff I wished I could've brought back for my class!
We went to Mercier's Apple Orchard in Blue Ridge, GA. We chose to pick our own apples (you can just go inside and buy virtually any type of apple, but we wanted the whole experience). We decided on two bags of apples, not realizing just how many apples can fit in one bag. We ended up with sixty-one apples. I've baked an apple pie, given plenty of apples to my coworkers...and still we have a full drawer full in our fridge. I am not normally crazy about apple juice or apple cider, but the cider at Mercier's was INCREDIBLE, so we picked up a jug. We had such a fun day and I can't wait to go back next year!
Next up...pumpkins!
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