Apple Time

We love to eat apples and we love to learn about apples.

Recently we spent some time in our class talking bout apples. Of course we read about Johnny Appleseed and his love for apples. It is a wonderful story. I only wish I know just how much is true. It is amazing over time how stories will grow and change. I wonder what John Chapman,(Johnny Appleseed) would think today of his tale.

One of the more fun activities we did during our study was to pretend we were apple trees.
Several years ago I made apples from felt. One side of the apple was red and the other side was green. I stuffed them with fiberfill. Before stitching them up, I sewed a little stem and leaf to them.

Each child was given one apple. I said "Go"! Then children began to drop their apples to the ground. Each time they dropped the apple, they would record the color that was face-side up. The recording was done with tally marks. This is a familiar activity. Each month we record how many days we have been in school. This is a daily activity during our calendar time. We talk about the 5th tally mark in a group goes across the others and a group of ten tally marks gets circled.
I was curious to see how many children would remember this and put it in to practice. I was amazed!!!!


After a while, I said, "Stop"! Each child then recorded how many tally marks they had for red and fore green. After all of the counting was done we recorded their totals,(using tally marks,of course, on the board. It was then that we saw the grand total of red and green apples.


It was lots of fun, lots of learning, and surprisingly, a very quiet time in our class. A rare moment!!




During our apple unit study, we did a couple of graphs with apples. We first tasted Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Granny Smith apples. After the tasting we did a graph of our favorites.





We also did a bar graph of apples using a poster in our class. This is Wesley working on his graph. Wesley loves to work with graphs in class.