Our year started with learning about trees in science and the plant life cycle in our reading curriculum. With fall fast approaching, we learned about the seasonal cycles an apple tree has every year. Regardless of what we are learning or when, food can be used as a way to stress crucial information and to make lessons fun!
While learning about apples, students examined actual apples and created apple prints. We then cut our own apples to make a class batch of applesauce! For the apples that started to get old, we cut them up and used them with toothpicks to create 2D and 3D structures per our math curriculum. To top it all off we made personal apple pies in a cup!
Near the end of October, we transferred our learning from apples to pumpkins. We cut open a pumpkin and used 100 charts to track how many seeds we could find in a big pumpkin. After reading, Spookley the Square Pumpkin, we used graham crackers to create the character. We ended our learning by cooking a pumpkin in the classroom to make personal pumpkin pies!
These activities have a tendency to reinforce one another as students draw parallels between the life cycle of trees & apples, apples & pumpkins, and more as the year unfolds. The use of food provides opportunities for fun reinforcement of curriculum lessons, furthers interest in science as lessons link back to nature, furthers development of fine motor skills, and creates a sense of excitement amongst students! After all the promise of your school lessons eventually turning into a yummy treat is enough to excite any young student!
