Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Apples Continued...


Along with the apple works described in the last post, I purchased some apple books that looked interesting for preschoolers.  One was "Ten Red Apples" by Pat Hutchins.  http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Red-Apples-Pat-Hutchins/dp/0688167977   Pat Hutchins is the same author who wrote "Rosie's Walk".  "Ten Red Apples" would be a good book to get objects or stamps for so the children can act out the story.    It's a fun rhyming story that includes math too.  

Monday, September 5, 2011

Apple Time

                                 

The 2011/2012 School Year has started! There is an apple festival next weekend in my area - where there are 100s of varieties of apples to try that you cannot find at the grocery. Over the years I have collected various apple items, trays, apple clips, etc. so we are going to study apples this month. We are going to taste different apples, make apple sauce, do some apple Practical life works, apple math, parts of the apple, etc.. There was also an apple fraction set I couldn't resist buying at a teacher supply store.

Last year I had found some very cute apple clips at a Japanese store. From the forest unit I had a winter wire tree which unfortunately had snow on the branches. So my youngest son and I colored over the snow with a brown marker and we now have to figure out how to add leaves.

Here is the tree in progress:





I have glued the tree base to the tray, and once the leaves get on the tree it will be a clipping apples on the apple tree work. Here is the work pre-leaves:



                                            

I had some felt leaves for collage and ended up using those to hot glue gun on the tree - here is the final apple tree:



At circle this week I am going to demo the Geometric Solids (for now - sphere, cube, and cone). After demoing this work I am going to demo making apples with playdoh. I found this idea on the Internet, will try and find the source so I can give credit where credit is due. First you make a sphere using red, green, or yellow playdoh (or clay) you can then add a stem and a leaf to make your apple. Thought this was a good start to the year, showing the sphere shape, getting into making an easy basic shape for clay/playdoh, and we can point out some apple parts too. Here is an example:


                                             

Happy Apple Picking!