Where can you find a little red house with no doors, no windows, a chimney and a star inside?
That was the question that the main character in the story, The Little Red House was trying to answer. The little boy searched far and wide until the wind led him to an orchard. Upon his arrival, the strong wind blew and an apple fell off of a tree and landed next to the boy’s shoe. The child took the apple back home to his mother. Together, they cut the apple in half horizontally and discovered a beautiful star!
As a class, we selected a Red Delicious apple. We observed the smooth surface and decided that the brown stem could be the “chimney” from the story. We sliced through the apple horizontally and we also discovered a star!
We took our apple slices and the created apple paintings. The children enjoyed mixing colors, tracing apples, counting apple seeds, and making various prints.
We also enjoyed apple tasting and graphing our results! The children tasted Red Delicious and Gala apples. Using their sense of taste, they made various observations (“It’s sweet like honey!”) and decided which apple they preferred. Afterwards, the children illustrated pictures of their chosen apple, which they cut out and taped to a large apple-shaped graph. We counted a total of nine apples. Six children preferred the Red Delicious apple, and three chose the Gala. By matching the Gala apple drawings to the Red Delicious drawings, we discovered that three more people preferred Red Delicious to Gala.
We loved welcoming Gaby Rothman to our classroom last week! She read such a beautiful story about honesty. Thank you Gaby!
Our learning expedition to Dame Farm and Orchards was amazing! We enjoyed taking a wagon ride around the farm and picking our own apples. Thank you to Marni Thompson-Tilove and Talya Benoff, for accompanying us on this trip!
In addition to our apple exploration, we are continuing to work on our I Am books. This week, the children will read their books to one another during our Reader’s Share.
We learned a special trick to help us count the syllables in different words:
1. Take your hand and place it underneath your chin.
2. Say the word.
3. Count the number of times your chin touches your hand. This will determine the number of syllables in the word!
In science we discovered how to create bouncy balls! First, we poured some glue into a bowl. Then we added a spoonful of Borax and mixed the two ingredients together. We added food coloring to the concoctions, which we then formed into the shape of ball. This was a multi-sensory activity, and the children used their senses to make the following observations:
- The glue feels sticky
- The Borax is bumpy like sand
- When you squeeze it next to your ear, the bigger ball makes a louder sound
- The colors are mixing together
- It’s bouncy
- It doesn’t have a smell
How can you determine whether a number is odd or even if the the number is too big to count out “buddies?”
We explored this question by thinking about the number 29. We learned that the last digit in any given number will make that number even or odd. We agreed that because the number 9 is odd, that makes the number 29 odd. We continued exploring this concept with additional numbers including 0, 55, 102, 117, etc.
We’ve also been practicing skip-counting! Today, we practiced counting our straws by twos, and we discovered that tomorrow, we will be able to make our second bundle of ten. The children decided that we should count the bundles of ten by tens to save time.
