This past week was APPLE week!
We made apple prints, both in our own designs and for the pages of our class apple counting book, based on Dr. Seuss' How Many Apples Up on Top? . We used big apples, medium apples and even teeny tiny crab apples.
Our class magazine this week was about apples, too. We learned about apple life cycles, apple foods and about the many animals that like to eat apples. We used Ms. Heather's computer to listen to the magazine text, and watch short informative videos about apples. We even saw an apple pie that was so big it took 36 hours to cook and was larger than the 4 people standing around it!
We continued apple math with our 0-5 apple sets. While counting to 5 isn't a big challenge for our smart crew, it was a lot trickier to make sets of worms for each apple to match the numbers. We'll keep on practicing!
Here we are making our torn paper apple trees- no scissors allowed! We worked hard to tear a big trunk, some skinny branches, and small leaves. Then we added our apples. They are beautiful!
Our flannel board came out this week, too. We built a model of an apple, and labeled the parts. We also made some apple patterns and pictures.
Cereal stacking was a popular center this week! We used Apple Jacks to carefully string a stack on a bamboo skewer. Lots of red and green patterns were seen, as well as lots of munching kids. Can't eat until you get to the top, though!
Apple Inspiration Paintings- we set out a few apples on the table, and let them inspire us with painting ideas. Using the colors we saw on the apples, we painted a picture. Some of us were inspired to paint apples, others created apple trees, and some used the colors to paint all kinds of patterns. ALL became a masterpiece!
Friday was Johnny Appleseed Day! We learned about the legend, and made pot hats like the one Johnny wore. We decorated them with apple sequencing.
It couldn't be apple week without some taste tests! We tried apple jelly, different types of apple slices, and baked cinnamon apples. We created a chart showing our opinion of these apple foods. Using our graphs, we talked about concepts of more, less, bigger and smaller quantities. We also worked on counting. Everybody that tried a food had an opinion, and every opinion counts!
Other fun events this week included a birthday and the start of class sharing. Our class sharing bags go home with 2 students at a time, and we all sit and listen as they show us what special object each one brought. The biggest questions of the day now are "Who's the leader going to be?" and "When can I take the sharing bag home?" Everybody gets a turn, but sometimes we have to wait :).
