I am so blessed to be a part of a group of mamas homeschooling their little ones. It makes the journey less lonely and gives my kids someone else to taunt besides each other. 🙂 The great thing about our group is that all of our oldest children are Kindergarten age. The interesting thing is that all 5 of us mamas are pregnant. So when March rolls around, there will be 17 children between us all! CRAZY? Maybe. FUN? Yes! We’ve already begun our year together and have enjoyed our time.
At the last part in August, we visited an apple orchard. We picked our own York, Fuji, Golden Delicious, and Red Delicious. It was very cool to hear one of the kids have the realization that apples actually came from trees; not the grocery store. Gotta love field trips…so tangible for learning. Here are a few of the shots I got of our day:
Sure glad I ate my Cheerios…that wagon got heavy!
I found me a Red Delicious!
Is it full, yet?
Look at those beauties. Apple pie, here I come!
Our apple picking crew.
The next week, we gathered at my house for some more apple fun.
We first played a get-to-know you game with M&Ms that one of the moms brought…the kids greatly enjoyed this. Each M&M stood for a different question the kids had to each answer (such as “What’s your favorite toy?” or “What is something unique about you?”) She even rewarded kids with extra M&Ms if they could remember facts about another child (a great management technique, if you ask me!).
I read Apples by Gail Gibbons (from our local library). Before reading the text, I asked them what they already knew about apples. It was apparent they had learned a lot from our field trip. One child explained how to pick out a good apple from the tree.
I wrote 4 vocabulary words on my dry erase/chalkboard easel from Ikea. I explained pollinate and blossom to them before reading the text, but left them guessing on seedling and dormant because I felt they could infer the meaning from the pictures as we read the text. And they did! It also kept them listening because I told them to tell me when they heard these words.
After reading, we did an apple tree craft.
They each traced their hand and colored it in brown (for the tree trunk).
We used green and red finger paint (some yellow, too) to paint on the leaves and apples. Messy, yet FUN!
I had an apple pie ready for the eating after our craft. The apples in the pie came from the apple orchard…YUM!
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These apple activities reminded me of a book ALuv and I put together last year around the apple theme. After I read Ten Apples Up on Top!, we made our own 10 Apples Up on Top book. He still has it in his “I Can Read” bin and gets it out to read it to NJoy on a regular basis.
I typed out the sentence, “I see ___ apples up on top. ” ten times and glued them in a homemade book (made by taking regular 81/2 x 11 paper and cutting it in half) . We used our number stamps and he stamped each number in the blank 1-10. He told me what to draw on each page (this greatly cut down on the amount of whining over drawing pictures!!) and he placed that many apple stickers up on top of each object. Easy as apple pie!
Thank you for joining This Reading Mama on a literacy journey.
~Becky
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