More Apples!

Last week we continued to study apples. The students have been enjoying learning about and even tasting the apples! We picked out a few of our yellow, red, and green apples and had a taste test. We then voted on which apple was our favorite and made a graph. The picture below will show you our results! For small groups we again did our three different activities. For the first group we did apple prints with paint on our letter A! We cut open apples in two different ways to get different prints. The kids thought it was pretty fun to dip the apples in the paint. Our second small group worked on finding all the letters in their name with letter beads. Once they found their letters they strung those beads on a string to make a name necklace. It was a great activity to work on names as well as fine motor skills. Our last group was measuring ourselves with apples. Each student laid down on the floor and had their friends line up apples to match their height. We then counted how many apples tall each person was. For our "Science Friday" activity, we took a look at our science experiment from last week when we cut up our apples and put them into different liquids. We definitely got some good results! The apples in water and salt water grew plenty of mold for us to see. The apples in vinegar and lemon juice grew no mold. We discussed how the vinegar and lemon juice have acid in them and it "protected" the apples from growing mold. It's so exciting to hear the thoughts and ideas the kids can come up with even at such a young age!

This week we are still doing some things with apples and also reviewing our shapes and colors. I'll give more details on this weeks activities in the next post. Don't forget to let me know if you'd like to join us on our field trip to the pumpkin patch next week. It's going to be a great time!

 Morning class on crazy hat day! 

Afternoon class on crazy hat day!

 The results of our apple taste testing. Red wins big!

 For snack we made our own apple trees with crackers, frosting, and M&M's. Yummy!

Checking out our science experiment one week later. It didn't look as yummy as last time. Eww, mold!

Here are our apples in the different liquids

Apples!

We have been having such a fun time talking about apples in preschool! Thank you so much for bringing all the apples in. It was fun to let the kids see all the different kinds of apples. For one of our large group times we set all our apples on the carpet and sorted them into groups. The kids did a great job coming up with different ways to sort them. We also had some fun apple activities for our small group times. We worked on our small muscles in our hands by tearing up pieces of paper and glueing them on a paper apple. The students also played an apple dice game to work on their counting as well as working on our first letter of the week (Aa) on our letter pages. Each week we will talk about a new letter and a new number. The two big highlights of the week were our "Science Friday" experiment and apple orchard dramatic play center. For our science experiment, we cut up pieces of apples and placed them in different liquids (water, salt water, vinegar, and lemon juice). We talked about what happens when an apple stays out too long after being cut. We then predicted if any of the liquids would help the apple from getting "yucky" and brown or if they might make them get brown even faster. We plan to leave them in the cups for a few days so make sure to ask them what happened to each piece of apple! As I mentioned before, we have our very own apple orchard in our room! The students have been enjoying picking apples and making apple pies in our dramatic play center. I can't wait to do more apple activities this week!

We have some very exciting things coming up in the next few weeks! School pictures will be on September 30th. We have it marked on our calendar at school and have already been talking about it with the students. We also have an exciting trip to the Pumpkin Patch planned for our first field trip. I'll be getting you some more information on this soon. And mark your calendars for our school open house on October 10th. It's been such a great start to our year so far. Time sure goes fast when you're having fun!!!

Picking apples in our apple orchard

  Fun in the blocks center

A bushel of apples!

The girls are making some apple pies

         

Experimenting with magnets at the science center

 The apple orchard was so popular that

  we needed to put out a sign up sheet to

  help us take turns

Our apple experiment on "Science Friday"!

We have finally started our first full week with both classes! I can't believe it took this long. Our afternoon class is doing a great job of catching up to the morning class. This week we started talking about apples and our first letter Aa! It was fun to hear each class come up with words that start with the letter Aa. Thank you to those that brought in an apple for us to examine today. We are going to be doing all sorts of activities with them. Today we put them all out to look at and thought of different ways we could put them in groups (size, color, stem/no stem, sticker/no sticker). They loved looking at all the different kinds and are anxiously awaiting the day we get to eat them! Make sure you keep checking in with your child this week and next to find out all the cool things we are doing with apples!

It was great receiving a few of the family projects already! It's so fun to see how excited the kids are to show them off. We will be sending home a few other exciting things soon. We have our first book order ready to go this week. I will be sending home a note with some more information about that. We also have our first field trip planned for October! The pumpkin patch! We will be getting more information to you soon. The dates are listed to the right in important dates. I'll be sure to keep the updates on here coming. So much fun stuff to share!

 Team work! They all worked together to complete this big puzzle.

 Enjoying some books in our reading library.

 Exploring the sensory table that's filled with beans. We try to keep more beans

 in the table than on the floor. Easier said than done :)

One of their favorite things to do is play teacher!