Dear Families,
In the Owl Room this week, we have enthusiastically continued our study of apples, building upon the children’s knowledge of different kinds of apples and the ways that apples are used. At the art table this week, the children have glued tissue paper squares onto wax-paper apples. We have hung the finished products up on the window, and they look beautiful with the light shining through them. Come and check them out! The children have also made “apple pie” collages. First, they glued paper apples onto a plate, followed by paper strips arranged to create a “crust.” The final
(and most favorite) step was shaking some cinnamon on top of the paper crust to make the collage smell delicious! This multi-sensory activity supports the children in building their fine motor skills as well as their abilities to follow sequential multi-step directions.
Cooking and tasting have been a big part of our curriculum this week. On Tuesday, the children sliced and peeled apples using the apple peeler machine. We put them on a pot on the stove, and when they were soft and cooled, the children mashed them and stirred them to make applesauce. On Thursday, we observed and tasted three different kinds of apples: Granny Smith, Gala, and Red Delicious. The children had wonderful observations of the differences in the apples, noting the different colors and shapes, as well as the different flavors. They all tasted all of the types of apples and then used charts to record their likes and dislikes. Finally, we used a graph to vote for our favorite apples. Granny Smith was the most popular apple! On Friday, we will make a yogurt-honey dip to taste with apples for snack. Eating so many apples has given us the opportunity to practice the blessing that we say for fruit that comes from trees!
The books that we’ve read this week include Where is Ben? (by Marisabino Russo), Apple Farmer Annie (by Monica Wellington), and From Apples to Applesauce (by Kristin Thoennes Keller). A new song (to the tune of the Itsy Bitsy Spider) has encouraged the children’s curiosity in the apple life cycle:
Once a little apple seed was planted in the ground
Down came rain, falling all around.
Out came the sun as bright as it could be
And that little seed
Grew up to be an apple tree
Shabbat Shalom,
Morah Larissa and Morah Kate
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