Apple-Licious!

We had a short week in Kindergarten last week, so we took some time away from our regular reading series to learn about apples!!  The children had lots of fun this week tasting, exploring, writing, and painting about apples!

We started off the week reading The Season's of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons.  We talked about the changes that that trees go through and how we can identify each season.  Here in North Dakota, we have 4 distinct seasons (most of the time!), so the children could make some great connections to the book.

We worked together to do some interactive writing, and create a mural of the apple tree's changes.  I was lucky enough to see Kim Adsit speak again this weekend at our state Kindergarten conference, and I learned a very valuable lesson:  when you are sharing the pen with children for interactive writing, they don't HAVE to do all the writing!  You can help things along a bit if it is too slow! We are still not quite finished with the writing, but we got quite a bit done in our three days of school.  I drew the outline for the mural, and outlined it with paint, and the children painted each section two kids at a time.  I was a little nervous about how it would turn out since we hadn't painted before, but I think they did FANTASTIC! (This was an idea that Kim shared at the conference)

We were working on the sight word the this week, and Deanna Jump has the best book for reviewing this word.  You can find it on here on Teachers Pay Teachers.  It's a great apple resource that has literacy and math activities in it.  We used the IWB to read and highlight the.  Each child got their own page, drew their self portrait and highlighted the.

Here are some other fun activities that we did last week: (syllable sort from Kim)

 

I got this idea from a friend.