Apples Preschool Fun (Ideas, Ideas, Ideas)

(43 Months)

Little Miss and Wild One love apples.  Sliced apples, dices apples, cored apples, whole apples.  They love apples.  When thinking about what we are going to learn about first this school year, I had so many ideas until we saw all of the back to school things with apples on them.  Apples it is.

About six months ago, we worked on an art/apple project- Ten Apples On Top.  I didn't want to redo it, since we just took it off our wall about a month ago.  Here it is though as another activity, click here to see what we did.  They had a blast, especially seeing it on our wall!

Pinterest is always one of the first places that I look.  I pinned all of my favorite apple themed activities onto a board and then started prepping for this week.

I started by making the trees, modeling after the ones I saw from Mamas Like Me.  I had five trees completed within a few minutes.  I added dots, to practice subitizing, and the number written in word form to each tree.  On the back of the trees, I continued the numbers six through ten (on the back of the one tree, it was a six; on the back of the two tree, it was a seven...).

For numbers one through five, the kidabunks rolled a die.  They counted the dots on the die, and then placed the corresponding number of apples on the tree.

For the numbers six through ten, they chose which tree they wanted to work with.  They counted the dots on the tree and then used apple pickers (tweezers) to pick apples to place on the tree.  After they were finished, they told each other which tree to pick apples from.  We haven't really worked with tweezers, we have used kitchen tongs (both large and small) and chopsticks, but not tweezers.  It took a few tries, but then they got the hang of it.  I love how dainty Little Miss is with her pinky sticking out.

They liked this activity so much, that when it was over and I was ready to clean up I was treated to a "nooooo, not yeeeeettttt".  Um, ok.  Heh, heh, heh (evil laugh) they have no idea they are doing math.

Grandma actually gave me this next idea.  Thanks Grandma!  Draw a large chalk tree and then ask the kidabunks to draw apples.  After they finished drawing their (blue) apples, they picked purple flowers and green leaves to decorate the tree.  Little Miss added a sun, a rain cloud, and rain - "because the apple tree needs sun and rain to grow."  Wild One added dirt, "because it needs dirt too."  He started drawing grass, I glanced at my flowerbeds being overtaken by weeds.  Inspiration!  Oh, look what we can do?  We can pull these little bits of grass out and add them to our drawing? I actually got squeals of delight.  Of course, two minutes into pulling weeds, the neighbors landscapers came and we had to go inside the house.

Above: Little Miss drew the sun and the rain clouds, with rain pouring down on the apple tree.

For snack today, we had a variety of apples.  We let the kids choose some apples at the store and they decided on a Fuji, Granny Smith and a Gala (plus a three-pound bag of tiny Gala apples).

We tried one  variety at a time so that we can describe the taste, I was looking for sweet, tart, juicy adjectives. First we tried Gala, Little Miss and Wild One said, "yummy".  Little Miss also went on to say, "these taste like the ones we have in the refrigerator"  - wow!  She was right.  Next was the green Granny, "yummy".  I asked if tasted different, "yes".  What's different, "the color".  Last we tried the Fuji, again I received a "yummy".  Oh well, at least we ate a lot of fiber today :-)

Here's the printable (free, of course).  In the boxes, I asked them to draw a smiley face or sad face to show if they liked the type of apple.  For older kids, they can write what it tastes like.  While they were waiting for one another to finish their drawing, they colored in the apples at the bottom of the page.

Since it was such a beautiful morning, Little Miss and I decided to go to one of the local playgrounds.

Then we stopped by the library to pick up the apple-themed books that we requested.  

What a great day!  I'm so glad we are all loving preschool.