End of Apple Unit and Centers

This week we had a short week due to our statewide Catholic Schools Conference today and tomorrow which made this week FLY by! We finished up our apple unit this week with a few last minute apple activities. We had already tasted applesauce, apple juice, and apple butter so this week we tasted apple chips. We tasted the Golden Delicious flavor. 

 

I will be honest with you, these were not necessarily the biggest hit, hah! Only about half of the kids said they liked them, but I figured it was something they probably have not tried before and would be an interesting new experience. 

We also made these cute crafts I found on pinterest.

Now onto CENTERS- yay! Oh my word do I LOVE centers. There was a point last year where my class could not handle the freedom and the switching of centers and so we were not able to do them for awhile. So sad. Centers is consistently one of our favorite things in kindergarten so to miss out is no fun for the students OR the teacher!

Honestly I do not know what I would do without centers. I love that they are all educational, but they are fun and they also teach my little ones how to work with each other and get along.

In my class we have a pocket chart at the front of the room with our centers for the day listed. I downloaded the adorable pictures for the centers from Deedee Wills years ago and laminated them. They fit perfectly into our chart! This chart used to be for my old calendar but then I switched my calendar over to be completely done on the Smartboard.

  

Have a great rest of the week!!

Class Applesauce and A Peek At The Week Ahead...

Well we finally got around to making our applesauce and oh my word was it delicious!! I wish I had taken more pictures but I was more focused on keeping my little kinders' fingers away from the sharp apple peeler and the hot crockpot... I figured ya'll would understand ;)

Before we made our class applesauce, we brought all the apples we brought in as a class to the carpet and graphed them by color to see which one we had the most of. I will let ya'll determine below which color won:

 

We had so many red ones that we ran our of room on our graph and had to make two rows of red. Then we went through all of our steps that I outlined in this previous post and I was finally able to take a picture of how yummy it looked:

 

Mmmmm... look at all that brown sugar in there!!

So this past week we were able to do a lot of work with apples, but we have not even made a teeny tiny dent into our apple unit yet! This week I found so many adorable ideas on pinterest that I have just been dying to try and this upcoming week will be perfect for them!! Here are some of the fun things we will be doing this week:

 

These two Johnny Appleseed ideas were way too cute to pass up. I love the cuteness of the Johnny Appleseed circle chart where they list facts they know about Johnny Appleseed. I have done things like this in the past but I have never made my charts as adorable as some of these ladies on pinterest!! They make me feel like I need to bring my "A" game when it comes to cuteness in the classroom. I also love the second craft where they write the sight word "I" (which is our first sight word in our reading series- making this THAT much more applicable) and their name.

 

I thought this little poem with the apple star stamping looked like fun too. I am considering purchasing an apple unit from TPT but there are sooooo many to choose from. Have any of ya'll purchased an apple TPT unit?? If so, would you recommend it and which one was it?? 

I hope you're all having a great weekend!!

Apples, Apples, and more Apples! Oh... and a Freebie too! :)

This week we have been learning all about apples- one of my favorite things to teach about! Tomorrow we are making our class applesauce and I am so excited I can already taste the cinnamon! So far this week we have read Apples by Gail Gibbons, Ten Apples Up On Top by Theo Lesieg, Ten Red Apples by Pat Hutchins, and The Story of Johnny Appleseed by Aliki. Today we graphed our favorite of those four books and Ten Red Apples won! This was funny to me because the copy we have in our school library looks about 50 years old and I was assuming my little kinders would judge the book by its cover (literally!) and not like it. They proved me wrong though!! Here is our graph:

 

I printed pictures of the covers of the books from the internet to put at the bottom of our graph. It took all of ten minutes but made our graph much cuter :)

Earlier in the week, after reading Ten Apples Up On Top, we used 10 apples to make an apple pattern on two large pieces of white construction paper. My wonderful assistant die cut 150 apples in red, green, and yellow for them to choose from while making their patterns. When they were done, I took pictures of them acting like they were balancing 10 apples on top of their heads. They had so much fun looking at their silly "balancing" pictures!

 

We also made the apple glyphs from my Full Year of Glyphs unit on TPT. I edited the directions a little bit for this one in order to fit our time limit that day and my students needs. Here they are below:

 

All week we have been tasting several foods that are apple flavored or are made from apples. We have been filling out the paper below as we go to document whether we liked the foods or not:

 

You can download this for FREE at my TPT store. Are any of ya'll teaching apples this week?? What are you doing to add a little extra fun into your lessons?

Crock Pot Applesauce for Apple Unit- Yum!

Nothing gets me more excited about cool fall weather than a crock pot (ok, maybe wearing boots and cozy sweaters... but the crock pot is definitely up there!). I love my Crock Pot so much that I bring my Crock Pot in to my classroom a few times a year to cook with my little kinders. Cooking is one of our favorite things because it is fun to do, GREAT measuring practice and following directions practice, and best of all... you get to eat a yummy snack at the end! 

Every fall the kindergarten classes at my school make homemade applesauce to kick off our Apple unit. It is a huge hit and a wonderful reward for good behavior (I pull the classic "I am looking for someone who is following directions to be my next helper" trick ALL. THE. TIME. when cooking!! It takes a great direction follower to follow a recipe, and I love seeing my students who usually struggle to pay attention rise to the occasion). 

Here are the easy steps that we follow to make our class applesauce. 

1. Every student is asked to bring in one apple to contribute to our applesauce. I usually buy a bag of whatever apple is cheapest to bring in for the students who do not have one. We do lots of math activities with our apples and then the real fun begins! We have an apple peeler at school that has a gripper on the bottom. This thing is super sharp so I never let the kids use it, I just let them stand around the table while I use it. Ours looks a lot like this one from Bed Bath and Beyond:

2. Once all of our apples are peeled, I cut the long apple spirals into smaller pieces and place them in the Crock Pot. We then measure out two tablespoons of brown sugar, one teaspoon of cinnamon, and a cup of water. We pour all of this into our Crock Pot. Before we put our lid on, we put in two long cinnamon sticks. When all of our ingredients are inside, we turn our Crock Pot on high and let it sit while we go back to our lessons. The applesauce makes our entire hallway smell delicious!! Throughout the day we stir our applesauce a few times and I will break up any large chunks.

3. By the time we come back in from recess, our applesauce is ready! I usually put the applesauce into our bowls and let it sit for a few minutes to cool down. I would rather it be a little too cold than a little too hot! Typically when our applesauce is done it looks similar to the one below:

We will be making our delicious applesauce next week to kick off our Apple unit and I can't wait!! I will be sure to take pictures of the steps of our applesauce making and post them here. 

Are any of ya'll hungry yet from looking at those yummy pictures?? I sure am!

First Few Days of School

We are officially on our 5th day of school and things are starting to settle in nicely. We have been able to start on some "real lessons" this week and I am excited to share one of them with you (I say "real lessons" because while there is more meat to them than last week, it is still only the 5th day of kindergarten!). We have finished our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom name trees. These were super easy for the kids to do, the most challenging part being the accordion folding. Luckily my kiddos are all very hard workers who are independent and want to do the work themselves. For this lesson the students had to write their names on the first line, and then count the letters in their name and write the numeral on the second line. This ties together both our Chicka Chicka study and our study of our names. I guess it technically counts as handwriting practice and math since we practiced recognizing and forming our numerals too. So this one little lesson accomplished a lot!! Here are a few of our finished trees:

You can definitely notice the beginning of the year kindergarten handwriting!! I cannot take credit for this idea because, like so many other things I do, it came from Pinterest. Speaking of Pinterest, I have one more picture below from my grade partner. Ya'll she created the most adorable tree for her bulletin board that she saw on Pinterest and I just can't let it go without being seen! 

This idea is especially genius because we will be studying apples soon, and then as we head into fall she can switch out the green leaves for fall colored ones. It is hard to see from the picture but she used scrapbook paper to die cut her letters on, which is something we both LOVE to do. It just adds that little extra touch to make it a teensy bit cuter! 

I hope you're all having a great week!!