If you have ever visited my room, you know that I am "The Apple Teacher". September 26th is Johnny Appleseed's birthday, so we had a week of celebration! So many of our activities fit right in with our units of study in each subject area. Following is just some of what we did. I forgot my phone at home one day and didn't get pictures that day.
We had real apples to cut into and explore the parts of the apple. Great new vocabulary was introduced to the students, like flesh and core.
We are going to watch decomposition of an apple. Here is what the apple looked like one day after we explored the parts of the apple.In science, we used a balance and cubes to measure how much mass an apple has.
Our writing for this week was about apples. Before we do writing, we make a circle map (not shown here), a tree map (the picture below), then I demonstrate (picture above) exactly how to use those two resources to write a story.Each week, we read a big book together as a group each day to help students learn how to read. Of course, our story had to be about apples!
If you notice in my newsletter, a poem is read every day. You can see the work we did on rhyming words, spelling words, and beginning and ending blends.
For an added bonus for science, we predicted if an apple would sink or float in water. Then, we conducted our experiment. The apple floated! Remember apple bobbing games?
We used a string and cubes to see how many cubes around the apple measured. We stacked cubes to see how tall the apple was. Lots of science and math mixed together in these activities. The picture above is a recording of information (data) from their findings.