The weather is finally getting a bit cooler! Here at Harmony's House, we are getting ready for Fall by exploring apples this week. Some families enjoy going to orchards and picking their own apples in the Fall for pies, applesauce, and cider.
For Small Group, we figured out how to use a hand-crank tool to skin and core an apple. While learning to use the tool (which was AMAZING!), we also talked about the apple anatomy: skin, core, seeds, stem, and flesh.
We taste tested three kinds of apples, identified as "green," "red," and "pink" (Gala). We wrote down what each person liked the best.
For Circle Time, we took our written notes and turned the information into a graph. We described a graph as something that helps us see groups that have more or less. We counted the number of people who liked red, green, and pink apples and colored the bars onto the graph. Once we had the bars colored in, we could easily see which group had less votes (green apples), and which groups were equal (red and pink apples).
Friend "K" asked a great question: "Why do you have lines going up and down, and to the side?" Ms. Harmony explained that each line helps us count different things. The line going up and down is a number line. We can count HOW MANY people liked the apples. The sideways line helps us see WHAT KINDS of apples we tried. There were three different kinds of apples. When we make the bars in the three different colors, it's easier to see which group had the most, the least, or equal amounts of votes.
During Work Time, the children spent a lot of time working with the new Explore Table contents. Ms. Harmony dyed rice red and yellow, and scented it with Pumpkin Pie spice. Then she added red, yellow, and green pom-poms to be "apples." The trees were made from cardboard pieces and red, yellow, and orange fuzzy sticks. Finally, the "acorns" could be filled with the rice, or pom-poms, and matched lowercase letters to uppercase letters.
Baby "K" is always observant of what the school friends are doing! :) She's getting bigger though! We are seeing more and more "toddler" coming out by the day.
The school friends did a lot of scooping and pouring with the rice to fill and dump the acorns. They also pretended to pick up "apples" from the "orchard" for making "pies" in the baskets. Fall, here we come!
