Apple Unit

DD did a unit on apples these past couple of weeks. Here
are some of the things she did.

First picture: The apple picking game -- Each of us had
our own apple picking sheet from kidssoup.com. (You have
to pay a yearly fee to join this site, but I've gotten
a lot of great ideas from there.) We took turns
rolling the dice and placing that many apples
(round red magnets) onto our sheet. Whoever filled their
page first 'won.'

The second picture (also from kidssoup.com) was an
activity we did using colored sand. I had her use a q-tip
to spread glue around the circle, then she poured on
sand and shook the paper off. She was able to do this
on her own.

Apple Muffins

DD, ED and I made apple muffins. They were AMAZINGLY good!

(U.S. Measurements)

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups unbleached flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 Tblsp b powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp ground cloves (I didn't have any so used pumpkin pie spice)
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup walnuts (I didn't have any walnuts or pecans so just added an extra 1/2 cup of apples)
2 large eggs
4 Tblsp unsalted, melted butter
1 1/2 cup sour cream (I only had 1 cup and so added a bunch of milk to make the batter moist -- roughly 1/2 cup milk)
2 cups (2 apples) of cored/chopped tart apples

DIRECTIONS: mix/blend wet ingredients together
before adding to dry ingredients. DO NOT OVERMIX.

TOPPING: I used a pecan (ground up), brown sugar, flour
mixture I had on hand with a bit of butter. The recipe
calls for 1/2 cup light brown sugar, 1/3 cup flour,
4 Tblsp butterDirections -- combine dry ingredients.

bake 375 for 20-25 minutes

More Apple Activities -- 2

Game -- After coloring the pig and apples we played pin
the apple into the pigs mouth. We used some other apples
we had on hand because we played with friends.
http://www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/luau/mpinapple.html

Apple Counting -- I have lots of number sheets on hand (see
the second picture) for the kids to do stamping. This time
I gave her a bit of red paint to make fingerprint apples
on her sheet. I asked if she wanted to put a green stem
on each but she wasn't interested.

Apple Dot-to-dot -- from kidssoup.com

Apple Activities -- 3

We've never melted crayons before and I read somewhere
that someone had melted the crayons and then used cookie
cutters to cut them into shapes. "Wow," I thought, "I
can use those cute fall cookie cutters we have."

Well, we used very cheap crayons (we had boxes left over
from a large function) and it looked plain weird. The
wax separated out and it looked muddy orangish-brown.
I just left the pan to cool. Only later did I see that the
colors were on the bottom (and we probably could
have cut them out).

Anyway, we tried melting crayons again with Crayola
brand crayons (but I didn't have as many on hand. It
did work, but we only made a very thin crayon shape
so they cracked very easily. Someday we might try again!

At least it was an interesting science project with those
cheap crayons, right??

Apple Activities - 4

We talked about the life cycle of an apple (accordian book
from kidssoup) and then glued in a little A book we got
from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/alphabet_notebook.php

We also did the Aa apple sorting game from homeschoolshare
but I didn't take a picture of it.

I recommend you check out the the (free) alphabet notebook
at homeschoolshare if your preschooler is learning letters
this year http://www.homeschoolshare.com/alphabet_notebook.php

The last picture is called 100 apples. We did this activity
together. We took turns choosing a card (a certain number
of apples from 0-8) and then we had to fill in that number
of circles on the page. We laughed LOTS doing this together;
it was just a nice Mom-daughter bonding game working
together. It's also from http://kidssoup.com/ (a site where
you have to pay a certain amount each year).

Apple Tree Toss Game

DD painted a big apple tree, Mom cut out holes
for the apples and they tried to throw the apples
into the holes.

Apple Tree Activity - 5

Idea from http://kidssoup.com/ My toddler enjoyed doing
her own tree.

As you may have noticed from the past couple of pictures
I save the lids from glass jars to use for glue or small
amounts of paint. It makes clean up easy as I just throw
the lid in the rubbish bin when we're done.

Apple Activities - 6

Here are two final picture from our apple unit, again this is
from kidssoup.com. Match the apple to the right word
family tree.

There was also a cute matching activity for sight words --
match the worm to the apple. We only used a few of these
cards, but can pull it out later when it's appropriate.