How many apples up on top??!?!?

Apples, apples EVERYWHERE!!  We had a great first few weeks of school learning about each other, about our families, about our classroom and about our school!  We also learned about the first letter of the alphabet…. And APPLES!!  Besides making apple prints, counting apple seeds, taste testing apples and graphing our favorite ones, the most popular activity that we did is reading “Ten Apples up on Top.”  The students love to try to balance “apples” (beanbags) on their heads to see how many they could stack up.  We also did an apple on top craft… That was lots of fun to stack them up on paper too!  What a wonderful way to start a new school year!!

 We also learned about apple trees and how they change through the season.  “The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree” is a wonderful book to go along with this art activity that uses children’s handprints as tree trunks.  Then we added different items to represent each season.  Summer was green dotters with red glitter apples; fall was triangles cut in fall colors; winter was simply clear, sparkly glitter, and finally spring was green tissue paper with small pieces of cotton balls to represent the apple blossoms.