Apple Taste Test and Trader Joes!

Don't you love Trader Joe's?  Look at all the easy apple products we found while shopping!  We could have added an apple pie, apple sauce. and fruit leather as well but we wanted to make the prep easy on ourselves so we stuck with 6 apple products (we found the apple newtons at Walmart).

Today everyone tasted freeze dried apples, apple slices, apple juice, apple cereal bars, apple newtons, and cinnamon apple snack sticks! After sampling the products our firsties drew a picture of their favorite apple product and we created a graph!

They had so much fun and everyone tried every single product!  We used photos of the product packages for our graph and it turned out great!  When they were leaving class today they were already talking about what pumpkin products they could taste and trying to convince me that a favorite candy graph would be a good Halloween graph!

Johnny Appleseed!

Today our firsties read our new non-fiction Johnny Appleseed book!  We began our morning reading the book and answering questions about Johnny Appleseed.  The kiddos reread their books to "prove" their answers, highlighted the information, and worked on using words from the questions to write an answer in a complete sentence.

Then they spent a little bit of time coloring in their books.

Tomorrow they are going to reread the story and then complete a Johnny Appleseed Directed Draw!  If you like this activity it is part of our Johnny Appleseed Mini Unit.  You can find it on our TPT store or by clicking here.

Apple Freebie with cute YouTube songs!

                           Here is a new freebie to celebrate Johnny Appleseed's birthday!

                                                  Ten Apples Up On Top! by Dr Seuss

There are two different versions,  a boy or a girl.  We copied the pages back to back and made booklets for our classes. The booklets can have as many pages as you like.  We made ours with seven pages plus the cover so the kids could practice showing different ways to make 10. (10+0=10, 9+1=10, 8+2=10, 7+3=10, etc...)

                                 Click here for the freebie.  It's a great way to follow up the book.

When I was up at 2:00 am the other night thinking about school (again!!)...I found the CUTEST You Tube video to go with this lesson!! Vancemo, the singer, is singing the book page by page (like Jason Mraz's I'm Yours) on YouTube!  Can't wait to share this with our classes on Monday!
Here is the link.

While looking at YouTube I found another great video that goes great with this lesson too.
Click here  and it will take you to the link to The Friends of Ten by Dan Colquhoun

Hope you have a fun week!

Another Apple Idea!

It is September so we are doing everything APPLES this month!  Today we read a poem about the seasons and made a 3D apple that shows an apple tree in every season.  The kids had a great time doing this!  We started by copying an apple tree trunk oval for each of the four seasons.  We had our students color the trunks with crayons.  Then we gave them little cups of red, yellow, orange, green, and pink paint.  We were out of q-tips so we used the end of a pencil that didn't have an eraser  to make "leaves" on the trees. The fall trees had red, orange, and yellow leaves.  Winter had no leaves at all!  Spring had some green leaves and a few pink apple flowers and he summer trees were loaded with green leaves and bright red apples.  It was so hot in our rooms today that the paint dried in record time.  

After lunch we had the kids glue their trees onto red, yellow, or green apples. They cut out the poem we had read and a leaf, and glued their "APPLES" together.  We then added a brown pipe cleaner for a stem and hung the apples above their desks!  They look great and are very colorful!  Next week we are going to be tasting apples!  We will let you know how that goes! You can find this cute project in our TPT store click here

Apples, Apples, Apples!!!

To take a break from the heat we decided to start our unit on Johnny Appleseed this week!

Johnny Appleseed Craft

We started by making individual Dutch Apple Pies!  The kiddos had a great time preparing the apple pie mixture and talking about the steps they had to take to make their pies.  Luckily we had a very helpful parent here to bake and bag the 50 mini pies for our students to take home for dessert!

Today we spent part of our literacy block writing How To Make An Apple Pie paragraphs.  We used the picture cards from our Johnny Appleseed Unit to sequence the steps for making apple pies.  The kids then wrote their own topic sentences, used the sequence cards to write the body of the paragraph and finished the project with their own concluding sentences.

Tomorrow we are going to have them publish their paragraphs and make the apple pie craftivity from the unit.  You can get the Johnny Appleseed Unit from our TPT store or by clicking here.

Family Books- A Fun TK-K Idea !

Conner, my pre-schooler,  started school last week and a homework assignment for the parents was to create a "Family Book" to keep at school.  We were asked to start with 6 pages!  It was so fun to make the book.  Conner had a great time choosing the pictures.  We headed to Michaels and got stickers and card stock that he liked.  We put each page into a page protector and Conner took his Family Book to school today.  He shared it with his class and was so excited to talk about what he had in common with the other students in his class.  My first grade son decided he should have a family book as well so we are headed back to Michaels so he can design his!

Here are the instructions we were given if you want to try this with your class or your own children!

Cover:  Name of child and photo
Page 1:  Family photo with names of members of the family
Page 2:  Extended family and special friend (photos and names)
Page 3:  My family likes to .... (include photos, words, pictures)
Page 4:  My family celebrates... (include photos)
Page 5:  My favorite song, books, poems... (include photos/pictures)
Page 6:  When I am at school other members of my family are at . . . work, school, home (include
photos)

We hope you enjoy this activity!  Happy Weekend!!!

School starts like the Malibu waves...a huge success

The first week of school has come and gone. It rolled in just like the huge surf we had last week in Malibu. PCH was packed and all of the surfers were out along with the crowds watching the big waves. We snuck out at lunch to catch some of the excitement. While we were down by the pier, famous big wave surfer, Laird Hamilton, was out shooting the Malibu Pier. What an incredible thing to see. There were drones flying overhead and the waves were crashing over the pier. The sets were rolling in at 15-18 feet. It was a great way to spend our lunch and get motivated to finish the afternoon in the HOT classrooms.

Photo: Shannon Marie Quirk