Aa- Apple

I gave up all of my hopes of going to an apple orchard to pick our own apples for this unit because life is just too busy right now. Instead we went to the grocery store and did our best to find a variety of apples. Even without the field trip we still enjoyed the apple unit (and we did make it to an orchard to pick pumpkins and have some yummy apple cider.)

Our words to remember this week were, "If I stay in Jesus, I will have much fruit." We focused on the Fruit of the Spirit. After telling her what they were Boo said, "Mom do I have any fruit growing in me?" I said, "what do you think?" She answered, "no." I said, "well have you given your life to Jesus and do you love Him?" She said, "yeah."  So we did this project to see if the Fruit of the Spirit were evident in her life. I made a poster of a tree and wrote each fruit on a paper apple. I told her that all week I was going to watch her and if I spied her having one of the fruits she got to glue it to her tree. A couple hours later she was waiting patiently for me in the other room while I helped Sis with a problem, so we glued the patience apple to her tree. By the end of the week we had at least one example of each of the fruits in her life.

One of the things we did was count our apples, sort them by color and make an apple graph. They must have been out of yellow apples at the store that day because I couldn't find one anywhere, so we did red, green, and called the lighter ones pink.

I  found the book "Apples" by Gail Gibbons at at the library. It was not suggested in the MFW curriculum, but it was really good for learning about apples (with the exception of one sentence I had to change.) We talked about where fruit grows, apple orchards, seeds, parts of an apple,different colors and sizes of apples, and we looked at the names of some different kinds of apples. Of course we also ate an apple for snack.

I'm starting to run out of new tactile letter activity ideas, so for this week we just re-used our salt tray and practiced writing "Aa" on lined paper and did all of our regular phonics worksheets. She's had a lot of practice with this one already since her name begins with the letter A... Surprise! Her real name is not Boo!

 We used this video clip from Johnny Appleseed each morning to learn this song that our curriculum suggested. My how Walt Disney has changed! I was shocked to discover that there is an old Disney movie that gives glory to God! I'm so impressed that I want to find a copy of this movie for my girls now.

We read a chapter out of the book Grasshopper on the Road called, "A New House." In the story an apple gets smashed that happened to be the home of a little worm. He has to find a new apple to make his home. I drew up this worksheet and Boo had to design a new home for the worm. Then she told us all about the new house. Her apple home had a bathroom, bedroom, living room, and even a laundry room. I thought she did a good job using her imagination. Worm even had a tiny stuffed bear in his bed, and he threw his clothes on the laundry room floor!


For our words to remember craft we made apple stamping placemats. This ended up being really messy. They had paint all over their hands and feet (don't ask.) I cut a white poster board into 4 equal sections. Then we cut 2 apples down the middle, got some acrylic paints, and used our apple halves as stampers. The finished product will have our words to remember glued in the bottom corner and be covered with clear contact paper to be used as placemats.  

Here are some the other books we read this unit

We finished up our unit by using our apples to make a yummy baked apple crisp with vanilla ice-cream!