Apple Time

Our autumn unit began with a fun week of exploring apples.

First, we took our pet shop down and 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.

Safety is always important when placing the pies into the oven.

Our country market clerks sold tickets for Cider Mill tours, as well as apples, apple butter, applesauce, and even apple donuts. 

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

Of course, having a little picnic 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. 

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, etc...). 

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 and increasing the number of directives is a plus 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 to spell their names and put abc's in order.

We can not forget about getting our little finger and hand muscles ready for writing by working out at the finger gym. This week we used two different tools (tongs, and tweezers) to pick-up little pom pom apples and had to drop them into the proper matching bucket.

Practicing making lines and writing letters is so much more fun in a sensory writing tray and one with an apple-theme is awesome!

Literacy learning pre-k style... it's the BEST!!