My Favorite Apple Activities

I LOVE fall.  We are having an exceptionally warm fall this year, and I am LOVING it!  The trees are slowly changing to beautiful shades of orange, yellow, and red.  The mums are blooming beautifully, and the nights are cool and crisp. 

When I taught Kindergarten, I always loved kicking off the year with an apple study.  Our science curriculum in first grade is a bit more heavy, so I’m not able to do as much as I like.  We focus heavily on the life cycles of insects through inquiry, but I still love to review the life cycles of pumpkins and apples with the kiddos. 

Here are some of my favorite books to read during our apple unit:

 

 

 

 

I loved making this class art activity after we read The Season’s of Arnold’s Apple Tree.  Kim Adsit shared this activity during on of her sessions and I do it in one way or another every year.

Here are a couple of charts that we did when learning about the life cycle and parts of an apple:

The pictures are on velcro, so the kids can mix them up and sequence them in the correct order.

Again, the parts are on velcro!

I also loved to fill my center drawers with fun apple themed centers! Here are some of my favorites:

Most of these apple activities can be found in these two packs.  I’ve put them on sale for today only (Sunday, 9/27) if you’re interested!

On Friday, we also did a fun directed drawing of Johnny Appleseed! The children are not quite finished with these, but when they are I will snap a picture! I followed the directions from this amazing pack:

What are your favorite apple activities?  I would love to hear – leave a comment below!

Apple Centers and Sight Word Winners

Wow! Thanks for all of the great ideas for sight words!  If you haven’t read all of the ideas, but sure to go back {here} and read the comments!

Here are the THREE winners of my new sight word pack! I used random.org to pick the winners for me! Be sure to e-mail me at growingkinders@gmail.com

*MrsCantwell*

*Donna Barrett*

*Jennifer Cailor*

This week has been a bit crazy for me with our parent/teacher goal setting conferences so I am finally getting a post up with my centers for the week.

I’ve had some questions about how I run my centers, so here goes…I *tried* a daily 3 approach, but ….

1. I felt too rushed

2. With 25 kids in the room, the transitions were long and tough.  I know with practice it will be begin to go smoother, but I guess I’m not that patient. ;)

3. I missed my writer’s workshop. A LOT. <---that was the kicker for me.

So, I went back to what has always worked for me, with one minor change.  I am now doing 8 centers instead of 5.

This is what my rotation chart looks like.  Nothing fancy, here folks! Plain and simple does the trick!

I use this chart for both math and literacy centers. The cards that are on the far right are the kiddos that are receiving some sort of intervention during our literacy center time.  So, for literacy centers, the children are working in partners.  This REALLY helps to keep the noise level down!  I do place the intervention kids in groups for 2 reasons – 1. they will need to be in a group for  math centers, and 2. if their intervention teacher is not at school that day, they will be able to slide right into a group. (We are very lucky, and have an amazing staff that works together to give kids what they need!)

The children do one literacy center each day.  Since there are 8 centers, it will take us 8 days to do this.  We do literacy centers in the morning and math centers in the afternoon.  The kids that were at intervention groups for the morning slide right into their group for math centers.  If you’ve peeked at my plans, you’ll see that I do literacy centers Monday-Thursday, and math centers Tuesday-Friday.  This frees up one math session on Monday for a more in-depth lesson, and one literacy session on Friday for a project or game or something fun! I’m really enjoying having that extra day to squeeze in some fun activities!

So, here’s a peek of what was in my drawers this week and last:

First up, math:

This one is an activity that I made a few years ago.  If I could find it on my school computer, I would share it with you, but I can’t seem to locate it!

This is another page that I can’t find on my computer ;(, But I have a similar one in my It’s Fall Y’all pack!

Sorry, this one is upside down in the drawer! This was great for the kids to practice forming their numbers! (Apples Math & Literacy)

Kids LOVED the dice domes! (I ordered these on Amazon). (Apples Math & Literacy)

We are doing AMAZING with ten frames! (Apples Math & Literacy)

This is another fun game from Cara’s What’s your Number? pack!

This is a write the room activity for literacy centers.  The children LOVE writing the room! (Apples Math & Literacy)

This game is from Julie Lee’s apple pack.

Sight word roll and write! (It’s Fall Y’all)

We love spinners! Beginning sound spin and cover (Apples Math & Literacy)

At this center, the children pulled a card out and found the matching lower case letter and stamped it on an apple! (Apples Math & Literacy)

We also LOVED working with our friends’ names! At this center, we sorted the names by the first letter.

We also explored ABC apps with our ipads this week and listened to an apple book at our listening center. During math centers, the children played a game using the Lakeshore math listening centers (no longer available!)

If you’re working on apples and are interested in any of these activities you can find them here:

 

I’m working on some fun new math and literacy centers for fall too! I’m done with the literacy part, just need to get cracking on the math centers!  Stay tuned!

Sept 23-27 Lesson Plans

Ahh friends.  Life has been CRAZY.  My dad has been ill and in the hospital, my daughter’s are so busy with school, soccer, and dance. And I have been S.I.C.K.  I can’t seem to get better.  This virus/gunk/cold/whateveritis has hung around for a good 3 1/2 weeks!  Is it too early to say I’m looking forward to Christmas break?!

This weekend, I did manage to break away for a *tiny* bit of fun (in between soccer, haircuts, dance and school work) with my daughter.

So, here is what my week looks like.  I may not get to everything – I tend to over plan a bit!  Click {here} to download a PDF of the plans so you can click on the images to go directly to the source.

Some of you might notice, I changed my literacy and math center rotations *again.*  I TRIED to do a daily 3 type rotation, and it was simply stressing me out.  It didn’t work for me.  So, I went back to my old, tried and true schedule! However, with 25 kiddos, I needed to break down my groups.  So, I have 8 centers that will go over 2 weeks.

Have a great week!

Apples!

It’s been a crazy 2 weeks here! We just finished up our goal setting conferences, my husband’s best friend from Norway was visiting, my girls (both of them!) were sick, and my hubby is gone again for the weekend.  I took my daughter into the clinic yesterday, and the poor thing has pneumonia!  Thank goodness for a short school week this week!

I’m still catching up on blog posts, so here goes!   Here is some of the fun that we had with apples!

Math Centers:

We practiced patterns with red, yellow and green apple die cuts. The children could decide which patterns they wanted to create – some were ready for more complicated patterns, and others stuck to AB patterns.

Counting apple seeds:  the children worked on 1:1 correspondence, counting and number writing with this center.

1:1 correspondence and counting again!

Number writing and counting

Sequencing 1-10. Sorry for the blur!

Literacy Centers:

My kiddos are LOVING the weekly pocket chart, and I love that parents are seeing the words that we are working on.  Thanks, Julie, for introducing me to this idea!

Sorting Sounds:

Roll and write with beginning sounds:

Reading and dobbing sight words:

Here are a couple of charts that we did when talking about apples:

The pictures are on velcro, so the kids can mix them up and sequence them in the correct order.

Again, the parts are on velcro!

I forgot to take picture of the kids’ science notebooks, but we also did a taste test, a float/sink experiment, drew an apple tree in each of the four seasons, and labeled the parts of an apple in our science notebooks.

This was one of my favorite projects that we did!  I saw it on {this blog} first! Thanks, Katie for the great idea!

We also did a super cute 10 Apples Up on Top activity that I forgot to take a picture of ….if you look closely in the right hand corner of the above picture you can see a tiny bit of one.

Have a great Sunday….all this apple talk makes me want to make some apple pie! It’s too bad our apple tree has not had apples on it yet! I keep my fingers crossed each year for blossoms, but so far, none yet!