Our Apple Activities

You know we have been having problems with the weather not cooperating with us and our lesson themes (rainy during the entire sun lesson, cloudy and rainy during the moon lesson)...well our first cool snap hit during our apple lessons so we were able to welcome in Fall during our apple lessons!!  What a great way to welcome in fall!!

Here is a highlight of some of our apple activities.

We went to the grocery store to buy apples.  We made sure we got at least one apple from each of the varieties they had.  Seth had a lot of fun picking out apples.  (I would have rather gone to an apple orchard but frankly did not know where one was and failed to take the time before we started this lesson to look on the internet to see if I could find one).

We put all of our apples we got in a cute basket I had so that we could enjoy looking at them all week (and as you will see below we used them in other activities)

One day we took an apple and cut it in half horizontally so the boys could see the star in the apple!  They loved this!  We then chopped up a bunch of apples and made baby apple pies!  YUM!  I got that idea from another book I had but really the only part of that idea I used was the muffin tins.  For the crust I used canned biscuits (because I forgot to buy the roll out pie crusts).  I just flattened out the biscuits and lined each section of the muffin tin with a biscuit.  Seth mixed flour, sugar and cinnamon with the chopped apples and then filled the muffin tin with the apples.  Aaron mixed together brown sugar, oatmeal, cinnamon and butter and we put that on top of each of the apple pies.  We then baked them in the oven at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.  They were YUMMY!

On another day we took some apples and I cut them into halves and we talked about what a 1/2 is.  Then we I cut them into fourths and then again into eighths.  We talked about how much smaller each piece was the more I cut it.  

We then took our cut up apples and I peeled them and we made applesauce with them.  We also took a couple more apples and cut them into small pieces by cutting them horizontally and made apple chips (a recipe I had in another book).

We combined the science activity for day 5 (which was making an apple tree) with the additional activity #3 (which was making a tree and labeling the fruits of the spirit on the apples).

I didn't have any brown construction paper but I did have brown foam sheets so we used that for the tree trunk and branches.  I had the boys lay their arm on the foam and spread out their fingers.  I traced around theirs fingers and arm.  We then cut it out.  The arm was the trunk and then fingers were the branches.  We glued this to black construction paper.  I then gave the boys some green construction paper and told them to tear it up into small pieces.  We glued them on for the leaves.  I then cut out red circles and wrote the fruits of the spirit on each circle and had them glue them on their tree.  I had the boys draw a bird on yellow paper and cut it out and glue it on the tree.  We then glued on the poem from the book at the bottom of the page.

For those who don't have the curriculum here is the poem:

There's a little birdie in the apple tree,

Chirping out his little song for you and me.

He's a happy birdie, and I think he knows

That God is watching over him wherever he goes.

But that little birdie isn't half so dear

As every little boy and girl that God put here.

So as I watch the birdie in the apple tree,

I know that God is watching over me.

(author unknown)

(I thought it was kind of cool that Aaron had done a very similar picture a couple of weeks ago in his homeschool co-op class.  They used the finger painting method...they used his hand and arm for the trunk and branches and then he finger painted green leaves and red apples. He mentioned this activity when we were doing our tree saying that he painted a tree before).

We sure had fun with our apple lessons!!