Apples Up On Top...

Exploring and investigating apples is a lot of fun!! We read a book yesterday and it mentioned that apples are round, well, we decided today to investigate to see if that was true. It's not. Although we did find a few roundish apples in our bunch, but no true round apples.

Reading Ten Apples Up On Top! by Dr. Seuss is always a favorite of mine. I love the counting and the silliness of it. We had to see how many apples we could get Up Top on our heads too!!!

Did you know there is a special surprise inside the apple?? We cut open our balancing apples to see just what could be in there... not only did we find itty bitty seeds, but we found a beautiful star.

Each apple had a star, but just like us, they each were just a little bit different.


We tried to make apple prints with our stars, but it just wasn't to be. Instead we took our Yellow, Green, & Red paint and painted with our apples. What fun.

Ok, so hands are sometimes a little easier to use :)

Painting with friends is always a bonding time...

Especially when one of your little friends is not so sure on her feet and grabs onto your arm with her very messy, wet, painty hands :)

Sprout & Roo were great sports about it!!!




After our time inside, we looked out the window and realized how beautiful it was outside!!! It has been rainy here for quite awhile and we were very excited to see that warm sunshine!!

Little Man is really doing a great job walking with the big kids!!

We can learn on our walks too... the kids found a yard full of these gorgeous (and poisonous) mushrooms. So, we had a quick lesson on "Even though they look good enough to eat, we shouldn't even touch them!! This is a look with your eyes plant, not your hands!!!" The kids were great, and when I told them I would take a photo of it, they didn't see any reason to actually touch it anymore.

Apple Buying

We took a little field trip to the local grocery store today. It was a lot of fun!!! I never really thought about making a trip to the grocery store a field trip. I always thought field trips had to be exotic, interesting, or museumy (if that is even a word), but after taking a workshop with Patricia Dischler at the NAFCC Conference in Las Vegas this past summer, I realize that anything can be made into something interesting, exotic or museumy :) if you just put a little thought into it. We live in an area that isn't all that close to many apple orchards, so I read the book Apple Farmer Annie, by Monica Wellington. It gives a description, both with pictures and text, about how apples are grown and harvested and then brought to market. We didn't read the text totally, but talked about what we saw in the pictures and how we thought apples got to our market. Then we took our trip to see if we could find some yummy, juicy apples in many colors.

Friends!!!

Look at all those colors

Sharing our observations with our friends

So many to choose from, yet we must have the same one :)

Little Man likes this one!!

Helping to bag the apples up to take home

Lil Bit wants to pick one out too!!!

What do you think Scamp??

We had to convince her that the apple needed to go in the bag, she didn't want to let it go :)

Look at all these colors Shell

There we go

Look Scamp, they come in different colors

We also found out that they sell more than just food at the grocery store.

Even the checkout line was a lot of fun!!!

Say Cheese Scamp!!!

I think our trip to the grocery store to buy our special apples had to be almost as much fun as a trip to the park would have been. There was so many people to see and wave to, there were lots of different kinds of food, we even saw boxes with a different language written on it. We enjoyed having all the workers think we were the cutest, most well behaved children they have ever seen, of course :) What a good morning!!!

Little Apple

We started our Fall/Harvest Theme Unit with something we can all relate to, APPLES!!! We are having a week full of Apples!! Today we started off by reading Little Apple by Brigitte Weninger. We love this book for its illustrations and simple text. I use it every year to show the many different shades of an apple. The illustrations really show off apples many colors.

First we compared an apple, banana and a plum. We talked about how it felt, what it smelled like and the different colors. Sprout and Roo also brought up how they liked apples with cinnamon, but not banana's with cinnamon (I promise, I never tried to give them banana's with cinnamon, but I think we might have to try it, it may just be yummy).

Then we got down to the fun stuff.... Apple Spin Art. Ok, so we didn't really use apples, but we used our salad spinners to create a multi-colored apple with paint and mini paper plates.

(I swear she was having fun!!)

What fun!! The picture above is of our plates, before the stem and leaves are added, it takes a while for them to dry as the paint has a layered kind of effect, so even when the top layer seems dry, it isn't dry underneath.

Can You Guess??

We read 10 Apples Up On Top by Dr. Seuss today... Well, we have been reading it all week and doing some really fun activities to go along with it. Yesterday we tried balancing an apple on our head, but all the kids weren't here and I didn't have my camera handy, so, we decided to do it again today. The photos above were of the kids having fun with 2 apples... we decided we couldn't try to do more, since we didn't have enough hands to keep those apples on our heads. The kids had a lot of fun. It was a silly experiment that all the kids took part in (well, except the real little ones, they just wanted to eat it).

First, we talked about how we thought the animals in the book kept the apples "Up On Top" and could we do it too?? Then I asked how many they thought they could balance Up On Top themselves... we got answers like... 1, 7, 70 (lots of giggling) and 10. We then put our guesses to the test... It was hard to balance 1, but 2 was "really, really hard Shell."

After our experiment we got to do our 10 Apples Up On Top craft that I got from somewhere, I was blog and web hopping and for the life of me I can not find where I saw this craft. (So, I am sorry to the person whose site I saw it on, but it was another great idea I got from someone else, I just wish I could send you their way.) I took photos of all the kids yesterday pretending to balance something on their heads. They were curious to why I was doing it, but I told them to be patient, they would soon learn why. Today when they say their photo cut out and glued to a large piece of construction paper they were very excited. So, after our experimenting, each child got to choose how many apples they wanted to glue Up On Top of their heads. They turned out very cute... not so much a process crafts, but a fun one none-the-less :)