We’ve been learning a lot about apples these past few weeks. It started out with simply wanting to row (for more about what rowing is, check out Five In a Row!) a fantastic book How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World with our co-op group. I’m co-leading the group, so it worked out great to work this into our kick-off fall theme.

All About Apples

We learned the different parts of an apple, and did some apple-seed math.

I forgot to get a picture, but each child got an apple core and had to count and graph the seeds inside – I got the graph from here.

We made observations about the apple’s appearance and taste, then graphed everyone’s favourite kind of apple.

The kids had a great time painting apple cutouts, which we hung up in the room and once dry, modge-podged and sprinkled with cinnamon.

Mmmm, smells so good!

We had so much fun rowing the book with the class that we decided to keep doing it the next week at home. JJ and Keekers participated the most with different activities, but even The Boy got right in there and enjoyed some fun.

Though most of the apple crop in Ontario was devastated by an early spring thaw, then a nasty freeze, we decided to hunt down some apples anyway.

It was a BEAUTIFUL day for apple picking. Unfortunately, this apple as the only one we found in the tree.

The rest were on the ground, either buggy or mottled.

We still managed to pick a good 15 pounds of windfalls (at a reduced price!) for baking.

The apple pie play dough I made for co-op didn’t get used (we ran out of time!) so we pulled it out and had some good fun creating with it. It smells DELICIOUS! I used the play dough recipe from Cheerios and Lattes, subbed apple juice for water, and added in nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. It does still taste like play dough though (yes, I tried it :D).

JJ wrote out my recipe list from what he could remember from How to Make An Apple Pie – he did a pretty good job, even with the spelling! He also helped roll out the dough for our apple pie.

Keekers helped me with the filling – I love having them work in the kitchen with me!

Some of our cut-up apples were turned into apple prints – that lasted all of 5 minutes, they preferred to just paint their own pictures!

We compared different types of apples – noticing things about their appearance, and guessing what their insides would be like.

Quite the difference between some of the apples, and we had to guess at a couple we had picked from the orchard since we didn’t know what they were!

Since Wednesday is Johnny Appleseed’s birthday, we are planning on heading out to another orchard, and this time we will hopefully find apples on the tree good enough to pick and make into applesauce and candy apples!