Five for Five and Freebies.

Happy Friday! It's Freebie Friday and I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs' Five for Friday. Here we go.......

We wrapped our Johnny Appleseed/Tall Tales unit this week with apple treats. The treats were made by a few of  the parents. We had apple bars, apple muffins, apple cookies, and cider. Yum! We enjoyed the treats while watching animated versions of the tall tales we read.

Thanks to a parent(I have a great group of volunteers), we tasted apples and graphed our results in a pictograph. Our mode was the yellow apples.  You can download a copy of my tally chart and pictograph checklist by clicking the picture below.

                                                                                 

The children paired up to read tall tales. They wrote down examples of exaggerations from the stories. The children reported their findings to the class. They enjoyed hearing about each other's stories and exaggerations.

We learned the life cycle of the apple tree and dug deeper into the parts of the apple and their functions. To demonstrate the job of the stem, I put celery into colored water. They loved it. You could see where the xylem carried the water through the stem. They also thought the word xylem was pretty cool. I got this idea from Pinterest.





 I will end with a quote.



   

Johnny Appleseed Day

 September 26 is Johnny Appleseed's birthday. We celebrate in my classroom by reading the story Johnny Appleseed by Steven Kellogg. This will be the springboard to my folktale unit as we will learn the elements of tall tales in folk literature. 

  Parent volunteers are making apple treats for us that day. For our writing activity, the children will write thank you notes to the parents on apple shape paper.
 The children will practice map skills in Social Studies related to the story. I created a map activity that I am sharing. You will need a blank map of the United States. The one that I am using comes from Super Teacher Worksheets. 

   The day will be a perfect balance of skill practice, thematic learning, and fun!                                                                      

 Do you celebrate Johnny Appleseed in your classroom?
Keeping it Balanced,
Tammi