All About Apples!

Sorry for the delay in posts here ... we've been busy! But I'm about to make up for it with a really long one!

We just finished a two-week study on apples, and boy did we pack a lot in! Not only did we learn about the life cycle of the apple tree, but we were able to label the parts of the apple fruit and do some super fun science experiments!

We started by making a poster with all the facts we already know about apples.

We knew that apples could be used to make a variety of other food and drink products, so we took a vote as to our favorite. You can see here that our class likes apple juice the best. Once every child had voted, we graphed our results. 

Toward the end of our week, we compared the appearance and taste of red, yellow, and green apples ... and again took a vote and graphed our results.

Yellow was the winner!

Students were introduced to the scientific method by predicting -- and then testing -- whether an apple would sink or float; we recorded our results by drawing pictures of what we thought would happen, followed by a picture of what actually happened.

The kids were DYING to eat their apples once we'd tested them, so I said yes! (I promise, it was clean water!) 

Another fun science experiment involved the apple seeds. We put them into clear glass bowls and observed what they would do when we added water. (The answer: Nothing. They sunk to the bottom and then stayed there.) 

 

But then we picked the seeds out of the water, dumped the water onto some nearby plants, and tried the experiment again, this time with Sprite. The students were super excited to watch the seeds "dancing" thanks to the air bubbles in the Sprite. (Plus, they just loved getting to pour the Sprite all by themselves. 😊 )

Finally, we also did a couple of cool art projects. We used apples to paint, but before we did this, we predicted what the inside of the apple would look like when sliced horizontally. It's hard to see here, but it makes a cool star shape, with the seeds inside. 

Then we had some painting fun!

The last thing was Mrs. Viall's favorite. Using plastic knives and working with partners, we produced red, green, and yellow wax shavings from broken crayons (great for building finger muscles!). I used my iron to melt the shavings, producing a really cool splattered look on these paper apples. 

The finished product ...

And how could I forget today's special visitor -- Johnny Appleseed himherself! Johnny told them the story of Johnny Appleseed and then passed out apple slices to the students. 

Learning about apples is fun, delicious, and healthy! 😋

Hands-on learning

If you're a current K5 parent, you may have noticed that your child doesn't bring home very many worksheets. That's because we try our very best to make most of our learning interactive and hands-on! Here are just a few of the learning activities we've been doing:

This little scholar is matching uppercase and lowercase letters printed on index cards.

See those green pocket charts in the two photos below? Right now in math, we're working our way through Numbers Bootcamp. Every day, we focus on a particular number. We count it, we write it, we're even introduced to the number word. Students have to select the different pictures that show the number of the day, and we glue them onto a big chart that the whole class can see. When you've got lots of pictures representing several different numbers, it's a skill to distinguish the one number for which you're searching! 

One afternoon, I had the students tear construction paper into small pieces. Most thought it was a lot of fun, though for some, tearing the paper proved to be difficult. Believe it or not, tearing paper helps build those small finger muscles, and this in turn helps improve students' fine motor skills. The next day, we used the paper scraps to spell out our names!

Another day, we spelled words with magnetic letters. We started with our names, then I allowed them to choose any words they saw in our classroom. It could be a word on a wall, in a book ... anything!

These girls spelled ALL the color words!!

Math games are a lot of fun too. One day, Mrs. Shepard scattered pictures around the room that depicted different numbers of items. When students found a picture card, they had to bring it over and place it under the correct numeral.

Once they'd found all the cards, we counted the items to see if we were correct!

Since we welcomed a new month this past week, the students helped me fill in the dates on my calendar. Not only did they have to figure out which number came next, they had to make sure their chosen color fit the pattern.

During Morning Meeting, there's always an activity for students to do. Sometimes it's writing their names or a particular numeral or letter. But these will becomes more challenging as the year goes on.

Our goal as teachers is always to make learning as fun as possible. And not only are hands-on activities a lot of fun, they help the students use and remember the information in a much more effective way!