When planning a theme on apples, it is a good opportunity to teach about life cycles and plant growth. Depending on your location, a field trip to a local apple orchard is a wonderful hands-on experience for young children to see where fruit (apples) come from. However, when a field trip is not feasible, you can try to bring the apple orchard to your school! We were fortunate to have a local orchard come in to do an in-school demonstration, complete with a large supply of apples for taste testing!
One of our teachers, Brittany Florio also works at the orchard, and led the demonstration – and made large pictures of the life cycle of an apple (from seed to blossom to apple) to show the children.
In the photos below, Kim Shores from Johnny Appleseed Farm shows some of the tools used to take care of her farm and her apple barrel for collecting apples. Miss Brittany shows the photos of the apple life cycle, including an actual branch from the orchard. She also demonstrates how apples float in water!
Kim also talked about the different types of apples that she brought (describing their color and what they taste like) – and then best of all … children got to taste 3 types of apples and then made an in-school graph of which kind was their favorite.
For some more Fall-related activities (with apples), check out:
Learning about apples and pumpkins in preschool
A “peeling” fun with apples (Little Illuminations)
Apple tree craft (Teach Preschool)
October 4, 2011
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