Apples

Theme: Apples

Age: Honey Pot is 2 years and 4 months old

Apple Book

We pulled out one apple-themed book from our library this week. It’s called Apples, Apples, Apples by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace, and is about a family that takes a trip to the orchard to go apple-picking. The text was quite easy for her to understand in most parts. But this book does go into great detail about apple varieties, parts of an apple, etc., so we just skipped over those pages. She seemed to enjoy it, and I love that there were several aspects of the story that we could relate to throughout our apple week (i.e. apple-picking, stamping and making applesauce)!

Apple-Picking

We had such a wonderful time picking apples at the orchards! Honey Pot was a huge help, and loved munching on them as we picked. Yum, yum!

Apple Stamping and Snack

I had seen this craft frequently on Pinterest, and thought we’d give it a try. Looking back, I should have used red, yellow and green paint (as those are the colors of apples) but for some reason I was thinking of autumn. So we used orange instead of green, and it looked very festive!

We had picked three varieties of apples at the orchard. So I sliced one of each in half, and stuck a corn skewer onto it as a handle. (This worked so well!) Then I demonstrated how to dip the apple into the paint and onto the paper. She quickly got the hang of it, and really enjoyed it!

As we continued on, I noticed that less paint is more effective. The prints look so much better!

Then we sliced up each of the three remaining apple halves, and had a sweet snack!

Making Applesauce

Honey Pot and her Daddy made applesauce this week! She was such a great little helper. We had her move all the sliced apples from the cutting board to the bowl. Then later, she helped as we cranked the food mill that we borrowed from  her Grammy. We may just have to invest in one of those because this turned out just delicious!

Apples and Shapes

This activity, as well as the next two, came from the blog 1+1+1=1, a great homeschooling website with tons of ideas and free printables. Honey Pot had to match up the apple halves with the same shape. I helped her get started…

“It’s a tent!” she exclaimed, after bending the piece up a bit.

And then she really got the hang of it.

Apple Size Sequencing

Honey Pot loved this activity! I asked her if she wanted to start with the biggest or the smallest. She decided on the biggest, and worked her way backward from there. She did an awesome job! When she finished, she even asked to do it again.

Do-A-Dot Apple Tree

I had meant for Honey Pot to use her magnetic pom-poms for this worksheet. But, well… we couldn’t find it anywhere! So I improvised and pulled out her Do-A-Dot markers instead. Ah, well.

What a fun week, and we are so excited for the upcoming season. We’ll be doing a beach theme over the next two weeks to prepare for our vacation. But stay tuned beyond that for some fun autumn and Halloween themes!

Fish Eyes

Theme: Fish Eyes, by Lois Ehlert

Age: Honey Pot is 2 years and 4 months old

This month’s featured author for the Virtual Book Club is Lois Ehlert. Our little library only had three of her books, but we really enjoyed reading each of them! We ended up choosing Fish Eyes for our theme. Here is what we did:

Fish Silhouettes

The last page of the book shows an assortment of fish silhouettes and very colorful eyes. They reminded me of reinforcements, which I happen to have aplenty! So I printed off a few pages of fish silhouettes from the Internet, in groups of one through five. I asked Honey Pot to count the fish in each group; and as she did so, she could stick reinforcements on as eyes. Although she has been pretty good at reciting numbers up to the thirties and even forties, she does still have difficulty actually counting things. So we worked on pointing to each picture as she says a number.

Spots and Stripes

Throughout the book, the reader is able to count the various types of fish. Each page has an adjective of some kind, such as “green” or “smiley”. I decided to re-familiarize Honey Pot with patterns by having her create her own “spotted” and “striped” fish, as are seen in the book. I printed off two fish templates from the Internet. She used her dot markers to create spotted fish…

(Yes, it seems the pages of our library book are taped together...and in the wrong order!)

And I created stripes with masking tape for her to do the stripes.

They came out pretty good!

Fishy Snack

We have a set of nautical cookie cutters, and I knew I wanted to use them in some way for this theme. After a recent trip to the apple orchards we have a superfluous amount of apples, just sitting in the kitchen waiting for a purpose. So I decided to slice them up and cut out fishies for her snack, as well as the old standby, goldfish crackers. She loved the apples so much; I ended up cutting more for her, which she ate in their entirety! And I got to eat the scraps. Yum!

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The Five Senses - part two

Theme: The Five Senses

Age: Honey Pot is 2 years and 4 months old

This is part two of our exploration of the five senses! In part one we covered sound, sight and touch. Check out all of those fun activities in this post! Did you check it out yet? Okay, good. Now we can move on to smell and taste. Let’s go!

Spice Painting

This idea comes from Learn With Play At Home. I had seen it in numerous places, where the children used glue instead of making paint with water; but we wanted something simple, as we’d be throwing it away afterward anyway. So first I took out a few spices of various scents and colors, and poured a small amount into an ice cube tray.

I added a bit of water to each and mixed them together with paintbrushes. Then Honey Pot got right to work! It is imperative that you smell each one before you paint with it!

As Honey Pot painted, we talked about how we smell with our nose and how smell is one of the five senses. She enjoyed the many different scents and kept lowering her head to take a whiff!

Taste Testing

I provided Honey Pot with four different foods from the four main groups: marshmallows for sweet, unsweetened cocoa powder for bitter, pretzel sticks for salty and lemons for sour.

Then I asked her to taste each one. “Mmm. Eat it?” she’d ask after each one. I asked her to just try each one first, and then she could eat the ones she liked. We discussed the words sweet, bitter, salty and sour as she tried them.

When she had finished tasting each of them, I asked her to help me categorize them by description. “Which one was sour?” She handed over the lemons saying, “This one!” Then so on and so forth.

Then she tried her first lemon water!

“Num-my!”

Letter: J

Theme: The Letter J

Honey Pot is 2 years and 4 months old

Leap Frog Fridge Phonics

This is always a great introduction to our letter of the week. I placed the letter J into it, and we listened to Scout’s song about how it sounds. Honey Pot was pretty consistent in naming this letter on her second guess all week. She always called it “I” first! Hey, it’s a start!

J is for Jellybean – Color and Pattern Matching

I quickly created a template of jellybean shapes, using regular printer paper and colored pencils. I made sure to match the ones in a bag I purchased for her from the Dollar Tree. Honey Pot wanted to eat them of course, but I told her that she could only eat the ones she’s sorted. It was good motivation for her to match them all up! The solid colored candies were the easiest for her to do; but this was her first pattern exercise, and she needed more help with the polka dotted ones!

Alphabet Search

I found this neat idea from a website called Tons of Fun. They have free printable alphabet paths for each letter of the alphabet! These contain both upper and lowercase though. Since we won’t be covering lowercase until our second time through the alphabet, I used their general uppercase template, and replaced a few other letters with more J’s. There were about five total for her to find and dot with her marker. She started off pretty well!

But she soon went dot happy toward the end and just wanted to make artwork out of it! I think if we do this again (which I hope to do!) I’ll make my own alphabet path with fewer letters to search through. It seemed like a daunting task for her at this age.

Play-dough Shapes

We like to use our cookie cutters during our letter units!

This time we also took it a step further, and practiced actual play-dough sculpting. We made “snakes” and tried curling them into J’s.

All in all, I think this was a wonderful extension of our usual play-dough letter recognition activities!

J is for Jell-O Painting!

For our last letter unit, we had a lot of fun with our ice painting! I wanted to do something similar this week, so I decided to use Jell-O as paint. First I freehanded a big letter J onto paper, and then I mixed some Jell-O with water, in two different colors, for Honey Pot to color it in.

She enjoyed the new medium!

And of course, we had to use other senses to explore it. It smelled so good!

Here is her finished product. I wasn’t going to put it up on her artwork wall, as I try to keep only the most interesting pieces there…but this just smells so good! I think I’ll keep it around for a while.