Danver's Shining Stars: Apples Week

Apples Week!

Here's some of our morning "free play" centers....

We spent a lot of time working on fine motor skills this week and LOVED using tweezers. We used our tweezers and red "apple" pom poms to create a capital and lowercase letter Aa. We also used these pom poms and tweezers to count out apples 1-10 on number cards!

We focused a lot on matching and patterning. In this photo we used REAL apples to match with.

On Monday we worked on the parts of an apple. We focused on four main parts: the leaf, core, seeds, and apple/flesh. Those little "seeds" are little letter Aa's! How cute :) Awhile ago I bought a hole punch set at Michael's which has every letter hole punch in it and they come in handy!!

One of our FUN sensory tubs! We washed apples in the water table. We had both real and fake apples, cups and leaf shaped gems that I bought in clearance at Michaels. The gems were just for pretty but we realized that when wet, the gems stick to the apples and the apples fit in the cups and look like ice cream!...yum :) We also used this sensory tub to hypothesize if apples sink or float...guess what? APPLES SINK! They were wayyy too heavy but our fake apples floated so the tub was still a lot of fun :)

This was our fun and messy sensory tub! We had rice everywhere but had so much fun trying to scoop up the pinecones, pumpkins, apples and leaves. I SCENTED the rice with LOTS of cinnamon so it smelled heavenly!! Can you tell sensory tubs are my favorite things?...I could run my fingers through the rice all day :)

Yes we even made APPLESAUCE!!!! We cored and cut 24 apples and added water, sugar, cinnamon and a little bit of lemon juice. We made it in the morning and it was ready for lunchtime and it was soooooo good!!!!

Here's a photo of the start of our project...

Inside the crock pot...

It's all done and mashed...we left some chunks in it and added extra cinnamon.

Our Applesauce Recipe

Makes 4 servings

(we timed it by 6 to have enough for the kids with a lot extra)

4 apples peeled and cored

3/4 cups water

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 cup sugar

tiny bit of lemon juice (optional)

We learned about Johnny Appleseed this week. We learned that his real name was Johnny Chapman! We made a Johnny Appleseed craft (very easy) and dictated one fact we knew about apples.

We also read the book 10 Apples Up on Top and put apples in order from 1-10. We added our own faces to the bottom, so it looked like we had 10 apples on our heads, just like in the story!

We had our hands painted to look like apples with worms for our thumbs!! So cute!

Our apple pie scented play dough and fun cookie cutters.

Their favorite activity was to cut the play dough in to tiny pieces!

It smelled so good...I added cinnamon extract and real cinnamon to the play dough!

Miss Vanessa did some fun crafts in the afternoon with our friends. We focused a lot on the letter Aa for apple. She had us create a letter A is for apple craft, which was so cute, even though some were backwards a's!

She also helped us make candy apples with REAL sprinkles. We even tried caramel with our apples on Friday! It was so yummy, we even licked our fingers!

Another fun craft activity was making apple pies. We worked on straight up and down and side to side lines and weaving. We cut the excess pieces off and used our fingers to fingerpaint apples!