One of my personal favorites is cooking with children. Some of my earliest memories are cooking with people that I just loved. I think it is so beneficial to the development of children as mathematicians and even as scientists. My team sent home a note requesting apples from families to be sent on Monday.
We tasted apple butter early in the week and graphed whether we liked it or not. Most of them loved it even though they had never had it nor had they even heard of it! Gasp!
Currently, I have a student teacher and for one of her shares she had them tell what their favorite color of apple was and they graphed it.
We also tasted many varieties of apples and graphed the flavor of apple we enjoyed the most. Many vocabulary words were introduced as we learned the names of the different varieties. We also talked about words to describe the way the apples tasted. In the case of Granny Smith, my favorite, we used the words tart and sour.
I also read a couple of big books from my districts reading series about apples. One of the books had a picture of a scale like you would use to weigh apples at the grocery store. When I asked them if they knew what it was about half of the class did while half did not. However, even some of the children who knew what it was used for did not know what it was called. I love those teachable moments!
One of our projects at the end of the week was to make crockpot applesauce. I read the book The Biggest Apple Ever by Steven Kroll (I love The Biggest Pumpkin Ever). The book was just sitting on my book shelf because I ordered it from a book order last year based on my love of his other books. after previewing it, I thought the message was important and fit with our applesauce adventure. The book also had some words in it such as ingredients that helped us through the process. We began this on Thursday as we talked about the ingredients. On Friday, we worked on the sequence of steps for cooking it. It really had them thinking about each step. Many of them told me after we wash the apples that we cooked it. I asked them if we just put the washed apples in the crockpot and they laughed. It was a great visual for them to help them understand the steps in the process.
I am really proud of the end product! It took a ton of work but I know it was meaningful and valuable to their learning in so many ways. I always try to think about the why when I am choosing ways to spend those precious moments of the day. I also tried to incorporate the use of non-fiction text so we read Amazing Apples a book by Scholastic at the beginning of the week. We labeled the parts of an apple using interactive writing.
It is so interesting from year to year whether kids enjoy it or not. This group loved it and wanted seconds. We did a tally T chart on whether we liked it and either made a tally for yes or no. Only 2 children said no!
It is really hard for me to believe that my class will hit the sixth week milestone this week. tome flies! i am looking forward to all things Fall. What did your class do this week?
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