FIAR - How To Make an Apple Pie and See the World

GET READY.....this post is long winded!  Not for the faint of homeschooling heart.  ;-)

I decided to row the book How To Make an Apple Pie and See the World during the weeks of September 22nd and 29th.  I planned for this to be a two week unit because...

1.  I planned to take a day off school to go to Arkansas to visit my Dad,

2.  I wanted to incorporate a study of Johnny Appleseed along with this book, and

3.  There are millions of FUN apple activities for young kids floating around out there!!!

This row turned out to be a happy coincidence on a few different levels.  For one, we happened to be finishing a botany unit in Nancy Larson science, during which we studied the life cycle of the apple tree rather extensively.  And two, I had no idea when I started this that Johnny Appleseed day would fall on the very week that I wanted to study Johnny Appleseed!  SCORE!  (I can't ever seem to get myself as organized and coordinated as I want to be, so when it happens "accidentally", I get so very excited.)

It was a great two weeks, truly, but I will tell you........I tried to cram in waaaaaay too much.  This became readily apparent toward the end of week two when she plopped down on the couch during reading time and snarled, "Don't you have ANY books about peaches or pears?  Or ANY other subject???"  Ha!!!  At that point, I was right along with her.  We read (and read and read) about apples, ate a great multitude of apple snacks, and wore ourselves a little silly with apple activities.

So, I erred on the side of well prepared for apple season.  ;-)

Anyhoo.....here we are on DAY ONE, when our enthusiasm was still full boar!

Her little present for this row was the Appletters game.  I've been looking for an excuse to buy this forever.  It's a little challenging for her, but the boys and I have enjoyed it, and she'll get there.

One thing we DIDN'T get tired of was reading this precious book!  How sweet a tale!

It starts off by saying how EASY it is to bake an apple pie....just gather the ingredients, mix and bake.  Unless, of course, the market is closed.....

THEN you have to travel the world gathering your supplies.  This charming book is remarkably humorous and definitely joins the ranks as a family favorite.

We spent many days with our fabric map and these amazing matching cards from Five In A Row Circle.  (If you're trying to prioritize, this is a GREAT activity for this book.)

I never get tired of map work!  I love how many places we "visited" with this book.

I used a colored string and safety pins to make a trail of the stops in the story.  We followed that trail every day with our little story disk.

At the end of the row it was hard to decide where we wanted to hang our disk permanently on the wall map.  (We picked Vermont.)

She did some of the reading aloud too.  Her reading is really taking off, and it THRILLS me to the moon!!!!!

In the story, the girl gathers...

wheat

eggs

milk

cinnamon

apples

sugar

salt

So....we followed suit!  One day, we churned butter from cream.  I poured whipping cream into a glass jar and added a few marbles.  Then we shook, shook, shook!

I forgot how LONG this takes, so we cheated and made big brother help with his arm muscles!

We also made a concentrated salt water solution by boiling salt and water.  We poured it onto a plate, then set it out in the sun to evaporate.

She was quite impressed by the beauty of the salt crystals!

There were SO many good videos on youtube about the ingredient list....

We watched movies about salt harvesting, sugar cane growth, grinding cinnamon, and apple orchard packing and processing.

(I had it on the list to make snicker doodles one day, since that would have incorporated many of our ingredients, but we never did get around to making them.  Sadly, I've been craving snicker doodles ever since!)

I made a sensory bin to go along with this unit.  I filled it with black beans and made little pom-pom apples to go in it.  I had an assortment of other fall items in there too, but I took it outside to play before I snapped pictures.  Several neighbors came over to enjoy the bin with us, which was great, but it is a total mess now.  I don't do sensory bins too terribly often, but as our outside playdate definitely proved, kids LOVE them!  I thought maybe she was getting too old by first grade, but they spent HOURS on my driveway digging and scooping and pouring those beans.  I included some tiny pumpkin gems and sparkly fall leaves that I got from the dollar spot at Target last year, as well as many containers and scoops.  I even found an apple shaped ice cube tray at the dollar store.   The kids had a ball with this, and the neighbors are still asking for me to bring it back out.  Sweet!

I also made apple pie play doh.  Homemade play doh is always a huge hit, and this one smelled divine.  We also took this outside, and same story.  Lots of kids showed up to enjoy!

APPLE PIE PLAY-DOH

(courtesy of It's Gravy, Baby!)

1 cup flour

1/4 cup salt

1/2 T vegetable oil

1 tsp cream of tartar

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp red food coloring (I used less)

1 cup water

Combine dry ingredients in a large, heavy saucepan.

Add in oil, food color, and water.  Stir well.

Cook over medium heat until dough pulls away from pan and becomes dry.

Turn off heat, cool slightly, then knead until smooth.

As I mentioned, this unit happened to fall nicely with our science botany unit, in which we read the book Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree.  We studied, studied, studied apple trees!  We don't have many apple trees in the south.  ;-(  I would love to visit an orchard in the fall and have a true apple picking experience someday!

We checked out DOZENS of apple books from the library.

This is my favorite picture from this row.....we had beautiful music playing this day, and something yummy baking in the oven. We finished reading a beautifully illustrated book about apples, and she sat down to illustrate and label the parts of an apple blossom by her own initiative.  These moments capture the beauty of homeschool for me!

I way (way, way, way) overdid the printables for this (never ending) apple unit.  Ha!  I won't even begin to share them all, but suffice it to say, if there was an apple worksheet, I found it on the internet and printed it for us to do.  Oh, mylanta!  

We did an apple even and odd tree...(First Grade Parade)

We made a book of flags from very country in the story (I googled line images to make these.)

We did worksheets about the life of John Chapman  (Mama's Learning Corner has cute ones)

We colored maps about where Johnny Appleseed traveled  (Homeschool Share has some)

We wrote apple facts on cute apple papers :-)

We labeled apple trees, apple blossoms, and the apple fruit

We did apple pie math, apple pie vocabulary, and apple pie sentences

We have a PhD in apples!!!!  :-)

One day we stopped at the market and each picked out a special apple. Any apple in the store...we got to pick our favorite one!

Then, we brought those two apples home and did an investigation.  Surprise, surprise, we wrote a whole book about it.  :-)

Apple Investigation sheets from www.findingtheteachablemoments.com.

This was a pretty cute activity, and one she really enjoyed.

I chose a Honeycrisp.  (YUM.)

She chose a Yellow Delicious.

She found 17 seeds inside her apple.  SEVENTEEN!!!!!!

She won the seed competition.  ;-)

I had a printable left over in my files from preschool.  It was for the book "Ten Apples Up On Top".  That printable would be too easy for her now, so we ramped it up and used it to do some skip counting.  We counted by two's, three's, four's, etc. to make our little book.

Then she ran upstairs, all on her own, and grabbed the book to bring down and read aloud to me.  I'm telling you, ON FIRE for reading this girl is!!!  Love it!!!

Of course we had to include a couple cute apple crafts, like this paper plate apple core.

A highlight of our study was our apple tasting extravaganza.  I've done this with all my kids, and it is always a big hit.  We go to the specialty market in town and buy a big variety of apples that we have never heard of before.  Then we all get a chance to vote on what we like, and we each pick our favorite.

I think I paid well over a dollar a piece for each of these......ridiculous!  Ha!  Those "special" apples are an investment!

I made cute little plates and "scorecards"

Apparently, I was far too busy carving apples to bother with ironing my tablecloth.

(My Mom is shuddering right now that I'm showing this photo to the general public.)

Envy was my favorite.  Amazingly sweet and crunchy.

Daddy came home for lunch to participate, and Oma stopped by real quick too.  I bought caramel dip as a special treat.

I didn't really take many pictures of our Johnny Appleseed studies, but this is something I have marked my calendar to do next year too.  (Johnny Appleseed day is September 26th, by the way.  His birthdate.)  I love the story of how this gentle man shared the Gospel message and left an indelible mark on frontier history in such a quiet and unassuming way.  His example of servanthood is certainly worth revisiting again and again.  The boys fondly remembered their old, worn copy (by Steven Kellogg) when I pulled it from the shelf, and happily joined in on the read aloud for old time's sake.  I bought a new version this year too....by Jodie Shepherd.  I treasured story, for sure!

The capstone of this row, is, OF COURSE, making the apple pie!!!!  How in the world do you do this row and forget to take a picture of the apple pie???  Goes to show how incredibly sick I was of apples by the last day of week two, I guess. :-)  There is a recipe in the back of the story book, but I chose instead to try something new I found online.  THIS recipe got fabulous reviews online, and I was intrigued because it is made in a very unconventional way.  I thought the reviews were well deserved...it was delicious!

WHEW......

We've been busy.

I'll admit.....we were ready to moooove on.  This may have been a good lesson for me in that old Jewish saying..... "just enough is plenty".  I think I'm still trying to find a good rhythm with Five In A Row.  There are so many great opportunities out there and it's hard to leave good ideas behind!  While I may have packed in a slightly ambitious row these two weeks, we really did have a great time, and together we learned a LOT about how to see the world while baking an apple pie!

All About Reading - Level 1

I'm am far and away from being an expert, but after teaching four kids to read, I'm a firm believer that some kids just "get it" quicker than others.  I also know that in our house, what worked for one didn't necessarily work well for all.

I think a firm foundation in phonics is really important, but I also don't want to turn reading lessons into drudgery.  The whole idea is to inspire a LOVE of reading, and in most cases, that's a tricky balance.

When Emma entered kindergarten last year, I began researching through the loooong list of current reading programs.  I was immediately drawn to All About Reading, and was really inspired by the overwhelming number of blog posts and reviews singing its praise.

I'm jumping on that bandwagon today to share a little bit about why I too love ALL ABOUT READING.

Emma attended a kinder program outside our home, so I started Level One as an after-school program with her last fall.  She tired really quickly the first half of the year, so we took it super slow.  

The format of this program is very easy to divide for learners like Emma who need to ease in slowly.  

The main teaching is done from a magnetic white board, with little magnetic letter tiles that are moved around to build words.  Right off the bat, I love this multi sensory approach to learning!  She can MOVE and participate....not just sit and listen!  She is building the words herself to actually see the concepts in action, without a lot of pen and pencil work to bog her down.  It's brilliant!

There are phonogram cards and word cards that we keep in a little file box to introduce new concepts and review, review, review.

Lessons are scripted in the Teacher's Manual, so it is an "open-and-go" program.

Level one has three hardback readers.  The stories are engaging and well illustrated.

Many of the lessons have some form of hands on activity.  Here is Emma earlier this year flipping fried eggs to play a word game.  These quick and easy activities are FUN, so often times we set them aside and play them a few days in a row.  This is a natural confidence booster, because after playing the game repeatedly it becomes easy, and she gets so excited about how quickly she can recall the answers.  (I want to mention that these games and activities are provided right in the lesson book.  You tear them out, and with very minimal work, are ready to roll.  Some require a few minutes of cutting, and maybe a glue stick.  In this instance, I grabbed a spatula for the kitchen to make it more fun, but I'm NOT running through the house gathering a long list of supplies or spending excessive amounts of time preparing for these lessons.  If you keep scissors and a glue stick with your reading supplies, you're set!) 

Here she is matching mittens for a kitten.  These quick and simple games keep her so engaged and make the learning fun.

Most lessons have fluency sheets for extra practice.  I found that in kindergarten she just wasn't ready for long and challenging lessons, especially after a full day at school.  So, we just broke it down into parts and worked slowly.  We may have worked on the white board one day, reviewed our cards the next few days, read a story from the reader, repeated the story, repeated the story again, then took several days to work our way through a fluency page.  By the end of kindergarten, we made it half way through Level One, which was the right pace for her at the time.

We picked at it a tiny bit over the summer, mainly just to stay familiar with the word cards and not lose any ground.  Once kindergarten ended I found she was much more capable of making it through a complete lesson in a day or two. 

By the start of first grade in homeschool she was ready to take off.

Reading is one of her favorite subjects during the day.  She never complains about it.  (Hooray!)

This week we studied compound words by matching birds on a branch.

Fun, fun, fun!

This program is clever, without being overly complicated.

Here she is "dividing" compound words with a dull butter knife. :-)

One of my favorite things about this program is how easy it is to apply the gas or the brakes.  When she gets it, we sail on.  When she struggles, there is plenty of review built in, and we just park for a few days until we have it and are ready to move forward again.

One day she had a story in her reader about a boy who carried his lunch in a sack on a stick.  So I delivered her lunch to her like this.....so fun!

My favorite thing over-all about this program?

SHE LIKES TO READ!! And that is the whole point.

We were studying apples in science a few weeks ago, and she ran upstairs to get the book "Ten Apples Up On Top".  She brought it down and read it out loud to me spontaneously.  Her confidence (and ability!) grows day by day.

We are just a few short lessons away from completing Level One.  I have ordered Level Two and it should be here any day.

I'll admit that teaching reading isn't my favorite thing.  It's so much PRESSURE.  It's such an important subject, and we have had more than our fair share of struggles in this area throughout our homeschooling years.

All About Reading is BY FAR the most pleasant and rewarding experience I have ever had with teaching reading.  I LOVE THIS PROGRAM, and am anxious to see what Level Two has in store.

As I mentioned, I think reading readiness varies a lot from kid to kid.  Some are more interested than others.  Perhaps Emma falls on the "easy" side in this area, but I credit both her progress and her enthusiasm to a program that has been a delight for both of us.

Keep up the good work, Emma!