Apples Galore

One of my favorite back to school units is apples. I normally try to save this for the last week of September to complete a cross-curriculum unit, plus have some cute stuff ready for our yearly Open House. This year, our open house fell on September 30th so it was perfect timing.

To begin our apple applicious fun, I start by sending home a permission slip. I know our district and state are very finicky about food.

We always begin with the “great” apple investigation. This year after completing the investigation, we make a cute art project after learning about the different parts of an apple. This was a quick and easy craft. I whipped a template up and ran it off on red, green, and yellow paper.

 

Our first taste test, was the apple variety test. I always buy red delicious, golden delicious and granny smith. I make an oversized chart to correlate with my freebie which you can find here.

I whipped up these apples after I couldn’t find our apple ellison die cut in the school. I searched for three days and finally gave up. I actually liked how these came out with the brown stem and green leaf!

I sliced the apples using my handy dandy apple slicer from pampered chef! I love that thing!! I don’t know how I ever survived before with out it! I gave each student a small plate with each apple variety on it! After completing the sampling, I urged each student to select their favorite apple variety.  They wrote their name on the apple and glued it on the correct tree. We completed our data sheets to correlate with our results.

The above sheets can be found in my freebie above. 

Next, we did a sampling of apple juice and apple cider. This is always the funniest. I am shocked how many firsties have never had apple cider. 

For our final apple food project, we made applesauce. I simply cut up all the apples we have left, add a small amount of apple cider and let it cook on low for several hours.

We did several data sheets for our apple activities. I simply shrink some of the sheets down to go along with an idea I had for an open house project.  I used some sheet from Reagan’s cute Apple Science and an idea from Mrs. Kamp from a second grade project I did several years ago.

I love art projects and I adore directed drawings, especially by precious firsties. This was such an easy “first” directed drawing activity and I was super proud of my first graders and their drawing talents. Here is a sample of a few.

Our outside wall is all ready for open house!!

Well, another open house is in the books! Our next project will be learning all about the seasons and Christopher Columbus!!! Going to prep for the game!! Go Vols!!!

Spell It Out

Hey y’all. Hope everyone is well! It is a rainy and quite chilly Saturday her in the Ohio Valley, but I am trying to stay productive. I am finishing up another Spell It Out Pack and getting ready to watch my VOLS!!

My school just adopting a new reading program, but we needed some help with spelling and grammar since we didn’t adopt a program to cover all the curriculum for RLA. Our upper grades adopted Houghton Mifflin Journeys so we did utilize as much as we could. I personally found the journey’s spelling units to be quite lacking. (How in the world do you test kids on six words?) This caused me to “think” about how I was going to implement and teach spelling with no material. After creating a personalized list of words with the help of several great minds, was had the basics… a word list. Immediately, I knew I had to do something pretty quick to help my firsties learn the key skills they would need to become better readers and writers. I started creating activities to correlate with the word lists and some centers to help reinforce the spelling skill for the week.

Introducing SPELL IT OUT!!

This new series gives you a list of skill words, supplemental sheets to use in class or for homework and center activities to assist during your literacy skill stations.

The printable pages include
A Word List
ABC Order
Word Search
Shape Boxes
Fill in the blank
Word Sort
Word Scramble
Spelling Test Sheet

Center Activities Include
ABC Order
Word sort
Fill in the blank
Unscramble the word