Apples and Pumpkins
and
Things In-Between

To start this unit, an apple was placed in a bag and the children played 20,questions to guess what was inside.  You could use any fruit or vegetable of your choice.  This leads to a discussion about apples...colors, how they taste, where they come from, etc. 

Depending on the time of the year that you do this unit, your calendar pattern could be apple shapes in a variety of colors...the difficulty level would be appropriate to the level of your students, such as red-yellow-green-red-yellow-green OR green-green-red-yellow-green-green-red-yellow.  I like to start with apple-banana-apple-banana.  At the END of the month, we place the letter A where the apples used to be in the calendar, and the letter B where the bananas were.  This is my introduction to AB patterns.  If you are not doing fruits or veggies at the beginning of the year, you can use an apple bus pattern instead...same results!

I have the children bring in 2 different colored apples and we use these in a variety of ways.  We sort them by color, size, leaves or no leaves, etc.  We use them to make patterns, and we even measure each other with the apples.  The kids always love to measure me and see how many apples long I am.  Sometimes we measure things in the room too.  Measure the principal, too!!  Another neat measuring activity was this...peel an apple and TRY to keep the peel together.  Then measure it with unifix cubes or manipulatives of your choice.

Of course, we do many graphs...

Do you like Red apples?
Do you like Green apples?
Do you like Yellow apples?
Do you like apples?
(We make applesauce with the apples that are brought in and then we graph...)
Did you try our applesauce?
Did you like our applesauce.
(Sometimes I bring in applesauce from the store and we compare and contrast the store brand and our  class-made applesauce.)

We finish our unit with an apple tasting day when we try different flavored applesauce, apple juice, apple chips, and different varieties of apples.

I'm sure that a lot of you do pumpkin activities, so I am going to highlight a few that I do with the kids.  We use a large class pumpkin and estimate the vertical lines on it.  We use yarn and measure the distance around the pumpkin.  We estimate the weight of the pumpkin.  We make a favorite pumpkin face graph and than carve it.  We predict and count the number of seeds...THIS TAKES A LONG TIME!!! 
   If you go into my Halloween page, you will find a neat art/science activity to make the life cycle of a pumpkin. 
    We bake the pumpkin seed and do a graph...Did you like the pumpkin seeds?  Another graph was Did you like putting your hand inside the pumpkin? 

Mini Grape Unit

Estimate the number of grapes on a SMALL bunch.
Have a grape tasting party and graph accordingly...Do you like Red, Green, or Purple Grapes, or all 3?  Or just graph What's your favorite type of grape?
Compare jams and jellies made from grapes, and have grape juice too!

Make Raisins!!!!   
Place clean grapes on a paper plate.  Discuss and record what might happen to them if they are put in the sun (not outside--just on your window sill.) 
We kept a daily log of our observations.
In about 3 weeks, the grapes should be raisins.  We tasted them, and we also tasted store bought raisins.  We listed words that described the raisins, and we also graphed if we liked them and/or which raisins we liked better.

A mini unit on PICKLES!!! 
We estimated the number of pickles in a jar.
The children used nickels to "buy" pickles from the teacher, then we counted by 5's to see how much money we had.
We tasted all kinds of pickles at our pickle tasting party.  We wore green to our pickle tasting party.
We measured pickles with unifix cubes, plastic links, and other math manipulatives.

Odds and Ends

Here are some ideas that I like, but did not know where  else to put them. 

1.  We made a favorite vegetable graph.

2.  We made a favorite fruit graph.

3.  Children brought in a fruit and vegetable from home.  As a large group, we sorted them in a variety of ways--by color--big/little--smooth/bumpy--I would eat this/I would not eat this.  I let the kids make up the categories for sorting. Thay are much more creative than me!

4.  Make patterns with the fruits and veggies.

5.  Use paint, cut the fruits and veggies and make prints .  These are very colorful and look great when hung up in the room.

6.  Make a ONE POUND IS book.  Open up a farm stand using the fruits and veggies and a scale.  Put the kids into small groups and have them choose a fruit or vegetable to weigh.  Find out how many it takes to make 1 pound.  Record on a page for the book.

7.  You can also have the kids do individual weighing...
        1 pound is _____________  lemons
           1 pound is _____________   carrots.
                   1 pound is ______________ apples.   etc

8.  At ANY time during the unit, you may choose to do a Venn Diagram to compare any two fruits or vegetables.  I usually start with an apple and a pumpkin because it's easy to spot differences and likenesses, and then move on to harder ones.

A     B     C    D     E   
Fruits and veggies are good for me.

F     G    H    I     J
Eat some.  Eat some.  Everyday!

K     L     M     N    O
They make you strong!  They help you grow!

P     Q    R     S    T
They are so good.  Taste and see!

U    V    W    X    Y   Z
Munch them!  Crunch them.  They're YUMMY!!!!

This is a rap I teach the kids.  I put it into a chart and we chant it daily.  I have some pointers with apples , grapes, and pumpkins on the ends that we use to point at the letters and words.

We made a BANANA CATERPILLAR BOOK.Each child brings a banana to school.Peel and  cut it into as many slices as they want to. (Model first!)  Make a caterpillar with the circles on wax paper.  Record information on each  child's book page...then eat!!!  You could use pretzel sticks for antennaes.

Each child draws his/her caterpillar at the top,, prints his/her name, and prints the correct number of slices that he/she drew.

____________  caterpillar
was  ______ slices long.

sample book page

A  fun way to teach or reinforce adding skills.
Give each child some pea pods.  Open them up CAREFULLY!Count and record the number of peas IN EACH HALF and add them together.  I found this in Math Their Way.

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