Apple Week- Part 1

Apple Week-Part 1

Our Big Idea this week is APPLES! For language development, we have been brainstorming lists as a class. So far we have a list of apple foods and a list of apple facts/ thoughts. Writing it all down at circle time helps us keep track of our ideas, model writing of words and letters, reinforces that everyone's ideas are important, and shows that we write for a purpose. Sometimes our Morning Messages and lists are topic specific and planned ahead of time, and other times they just occur naturally, such as this morning when our leader said gray was her favorite color, and it led to an impromptu discussion of things that are gray.

 

We've also created a class collage of things that start with the Mm sound (which actually had nothing to do with apples) . After coloring some Mm pictures and circling the Mm in each word, we dove into a pile of grocery store circulars, magazines and pictures Ms. Heather printed out from the internet to find lots of Mm pictures to glue on our Mm cutouts. We found monkeys, muffins, mice (computer and animal), mazes, mashed potatoes, meat, mayonnaise, and lots more. We'll do another collage on Friday when everyone brings in their Aa picture homework!

Fine Motor Practice

In addition to our usual coloring, cutting and writing practice, we have had 2 fine motor centers this week to go along with our apple theme. On Monday we laced yarn through large apple cutouts (these came home so we could practice again and again), and on Tuesday we used our grabbers to play with a big bowl of water beads in the apple colors of red, green and yellow. The idea was to use the grabbers to scoop up just 1 of the slippery water beads for each section of our ice cube tray. Many of us also found it was fun to bury our hands and squish the beads around after our tray was full!

Apple Math

Math has been on our minds this week! We began by patterning on our felt board with apple cutouts. At centers, we put our stack of apple cutouts with numbers in order from 0 to 5. After gluing these down, we added worms to each apple to match the number. While most of us can orally count to 5 without much trouble, this gave us lots of practice on matching sets to a number- which is a lot trickier! Our other math center was an apple tree game. Each group had a tree mat with black dots. Children took turns rolling the dice, and counting the dots on the dice. The he/she added the corresponding number of apples to the tree. First person to cover all the black dots with apples wins!

Apple Art

Last, but certainly not least, is our Apple Art! The children have created 2 art projects this week. On Monday, our art center was tearing paper into small pieces to create free form apple trees. 

On Tuesday, we had our Apple Invitation Center. Basically, this is where we set out some art materials and a focus object, but don't direct the children toward a specific product. The first picture below shows what the children saw on their table. Check out the variety of interpretations in the resulting artwork!