Apple Time!

Our autumn unit began with a fun week of exploring apples.
First, we took our pet shop down and we set up an apple orchard complete with an apple cafe'.

The children picked apples and filled bushel baskets.

Our bakers rolled pastry dough and stirred diced apples to prepare fresh apple pies.

Our country market clerks sold tickets for Cider Mill tours, as well as apples, apple butter, applesauce, and even apple donuts. Money and credit cards are being used in abundance. These kids are masters at swiping cards. So funny!

Our apple pickers sorted apples by color into the bins in our store where they were bagged for sale.

Of course, reading a good apple book helped pass the time while waiting for the cider mill tour to begin.

We listened to a story about a little boy who found a star in an apple, so we cut open a few apples we discovered that tipping an apple on its side allowed us to find a star in the apple too. Cutting it from the top to the bottom there was no star. We also observed that over time, the flesh of the apple turned brown. Ewwww! Why did that happen?

The prekinders LOVE experiments. We enjoyed making predictions on whether or not an apple would float or sink when placed in a tub of water. 

Just for fun, we also tested out a few rocks as well.

Playing games is an important part of learning. There are rules to follow, directions to listen to, and turn-taking. Here the children are engaged in a visual discrimination game involving listening for details (find the BIG green apple, with 2 bites). These types of games are really beneficial to play with your child. You can even make games out of routines at home. Anything involving following directions is a plus and increasing the number of directives to work on memory skills!

Of course, sensory experiences are so important for little ones, so we created a mini apple tree sensory bin complete with fat tree cookie tree trunks, driftwood tree branches, and dried peas for the leaves. We threw in a few pom pom apples along with some ABC apples and the children hunted and identified the alphabet letters as they filled in their recording sheet. Literacy learning pre-k style!!

Preparing and baking apple bites was the culmination of our special week. First, we used an apple tool to remove the core and then the children chopped the apples into small chunks. We had fun picking out the seeds too.

We rolled and flattened the dough and spooned a few apples in the center. It was so fun to wrap the pastry dough around the apples. 

We sprinkled cinnamon on top and then popped them in the oven. 

They were sooooo yummy. The entire first floor smelled delicious all day long:)

Happy Autumn!!

(Watch for another post coming with some of our Discovery Lab activities.)

Everybody Needs a Rock

We enjoyed another amazing STREAM Tinker Time. We started our session by reading the book Everybody Needs a Rock. 

Next, we revisited our prior discussion about balancing things after reading Ten Apples up on Top from earlier in the week. We talked about WHY it is difficult to balance the apples on our head... they both have a slight curve. Ask your child and he/she will inform you fully on this topic. We tried to balance bean bags on our heads and found it was much easier... we could mold them to our heads.

Our challenge this afternoon, was to build a sculpture using rocks.

 

The level of focus was incredible.

This was tricky, but the results were wonderful!!

Rocks are a wonderful natural material for children to interact with. I had to promise the rocks would come back out again tomorrow:)