Apple Week- Part 2

Apple Cooking!

We had 2 cooking projects this week: caramel dip and apple pies. Wednesday we attacked 2 large bags of caramels that needed unwrapping. It was tricky, and we had to remember not to eat them!

Then we added some milk and Ms. Heather put the pot on to warm up. We went off to centers anticipating a yummy warm dip to have with some apple slices. Then Ms. Heather scorched it, trashed it, and we had peanut butter dip instead. Sometimes that happens when Ms. Heather cooks! The kids were troopers: no one complained, and we enjoyed our snack.

After snack, we used our new picture graph to record whether we liked the green apples or the red apples best:

We used the graph to talk about the concepts of "most" and "least/ fewest". We also practiced counting carefully, with 1:1 correspondence. Green apples were the favorite!

Thursday was apple pie day! Before cooking, we used the flannel board to talk about the different parts of an apple, which parts we wanted in our pie, and which parts we needed to remove.

We loaded everyone up with lots of cooking supplies (especially apples) and marched over to Fellowship Hall to make some pies. 

Step 1: Peel the apples with the super cool peeler/ corer contraption:

 Step 2: Chop apple into small pieces.

 Step 3: Place apple pieces on flattened out refrigerated biscuit dough round and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.

Step 4: Fold over and seal, then pop in the oven for 20 minutes. At this point, Mrs. Horton took all the kids out to the playground while the pies cooked. Ms. Heather was reminded (TWICE) to make sure they don't burn.

Perfectly cooked apple pies!

Step 5: EAT!

On Friday, we tried some caramel dip with apple slices (no cooking this time) and enjoyed that too!

Other Apple Fun

We didn't just eat over the last few days! 

Apple Measuring

Apple reading

Apple tree sequencing on our Johnny Appleseed hats

Apple Jack patterning

"Tt" is for tree

Our homework collage

Our First Book

I've taken the pictures from our Mini Me projects and uploaded them to epubbud.com to create a little digital book you can look at on your computer, iPad, kindle fire or smartphone. Check it out by clicking on the link below!

The Adventures of Me and Mini Me

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!

Handwriting Helpers

    We spent a lot of time working on our writing the past few days. While we always try to write our names on our morning work, some of the letters are very tricky to get on a paper. Every day we do some kind of fine motor prewriting or writing practice with crayons, markers or pencils. Sometimes we just need to put the paper away and try something a little different! Trays of cornmeal made for a fun and new way to form letters. We used our "pencil finger" to work on forming our focus letters Aa and Mm, as well as letters in our names. It took some hand over hand practice with the teacher, and a bit of "erasing" (lightly shaking trays to get a new smooth surface), but everyone wrote some letters to be proud of! After showing Ms. Heather some beautiful letters, we also drew pictures to go with the letter sounds.

      Check out our new classroom rug in the picture below! The designated center on the rug was lego building, but it was also fun to line up our blocks on the letters and trace them with our fingers, not to mention hopping on letters in our name. Another new handwriting helper was playing Letter School on Ms. Heather's iPad. This app ONLY lets students form letters the correct way, from the starting point at the top all the way to the end. But it engages the kids' attention so completely that they don't seem to mind at all the 10 tries it might take to get it just right. Fun graphics such as moving trains on letter tracks or light shows were a well deserved reward for carefully forming a letter perfectly. Ms. Heather was also extremely impressed with how well the children did waiting for each other patiently, encouraging each other to keep at it, and following the iPad rules (1 finger gentle touch, always stays flat on the table)!

S-- is working hard to get the tricky capital M!

Q-- made an astronaut because it starts with A!

E.B-- loves the fun texture while working on letters!

I-- is proud of his beautiful "I"!

Our beautiful new classroom rug has all the letters-> fun to play on and fun to trace over with our fingers.

Feelings and Faces!

We have been talking about "ME" this week as our big idea. What we like, don't like, how we feel, and how we look. We are working to recognize our own name, and our classmates' names. 

Our centers are coming along! We are still working this week on staying with our color group, even if we have finished our job. Cleanup and switching centers is getting smoother and quicker each day. Today we:

added facial features with play dough. 
                     
worked with Mrs. Horton on some pages about ourselves for our memory book.

had fun with facial features and potato heads.

painted the body shapes for our Mini Me projects, then went to the abc toys since that was a short job.

Earlier this week we read a fun story about making faces in the mirror. So, we got out the hand mirrors and made some faces of our own!

Here is MAD:

and HAPPY:

 

Then we tried SICK and SAD!

                        

Mostly we ended up with GIGGLY!