More Apples...What a week!

We have been having an apple-licious week.  Getting to present great learning to students in a fun-themed way makes me love Kindergarten.  This week was all about apples.  Yum!

Some of the highlights included my climbing the apple tree in our outdoor education center and handing apples down to my students so we could make applesauce.  Don't worry I really wasn't that high in the tree, but what was a person to do....all the low apples had been picked.  Students worked on their circle maps and torn paper mosaics while I washed, peeled, and cut the apples.  The apples went into the crock pot with brown sugar and a bit of water, it was ready by 2 o'clock snack time.

Wednesday was our "Switch Around Day" in honor of Johnny Appleseed's birthday.  Once a month my Kindergarten team gets together and we rotate all four classes through each room.  We often pick a theme and everyone chooses an activity to go with the theme.  We then move the kids from room to room and we teach our lesson four times.  Fun for the kids....fun for us! 

Night before.... getting ready.

 In my room we tasted apples and graphed the results.  I made a graph for each class because I knew we would not have time to talk about the data during our short half hour class.  Plus I was hoping they would be so cute everyone would want to hang them up.  The idea for the graph came from Deanna Jump's Apples! Math and Literacy Activities.  Our recording page came from there too.

An apple graph will go here.

Apples ready to taste

After tasting the students will stand at the table of the color of apple they liked best.  They will paint an apple on a quarter sheet of construction paper, cut it out, move to the table you can't see in the picture to make a stem.  Then I will help them put the apple on the right tree.  Voila!  Cute graph and then it's time to look at the data.

Finished graph...I love how the apples turned out!  This will hang in the hallway tomorrow along with our data page.

  In another classroom the students learned about growing apples.  

The half hour switch around time was not long enough to finish these...but they were too cute to let them stay unfinished.  We worked on them again on Friday and everyone took home their finished product..  This student is using a neighbor's to help guide her as she finishes.

Finished poster...how cute is that for teaching how an apple grows and sequencing.

Does your classroom get as messy as mine?  Best thing I pinned and started using this year is a scrap bucket at each table.  Scraps go right in the bucket as they work.  Most of the time it doesn't come close to this messy...but even when it does clean-up is quick.

Ready to go again.

All week long we made circle maps, labeled apples, learned about brace maps and tree maps.  I saved all of these and they will make a little apple portfolio of their work.  Many of our math stations centered around apples too.  We made an apple seed counting book, patterns with little die cut apples, sorted apples and practiced talking about more and less, and we illustrated Ten Apples Up On Top.

With our second grade reading buddies we sequenced the story of "Johnny Appleseed" planting, growing, picking, and eating apples.  The stories went in little apple books and our buddies helped us write a sentence on each page to tell the story.  These books also went home on Friday.

Phew!  I'm tired.  But I am already looking forward to next week.

Terri