A Day In The Orchard

What better way to learn about fruits that grow in the orchard than actually going TO a real orchard to pick fruit??!! And there is no better fruit in season to pick than Fuji apples in Japan! I could not have timed the sequence of curriculum days and field trip day any more perfectly. We learned all about apples on Day 6 (Mother Goose Tme) which fell on Thursday, and since we learned about leaves the day before, I combined concepts in a couple different center activities. 

First, on "leaf" day, they made the adorable hungry caterpillar leaves. The half of my class who returned from last school year remembered doing The Very Hungry Caterpillar unit, and one student even remembered that "on Monday, the caterpillar ate through one apple." I had jar of random beads that I mixed in with the red beads provided in the curriculum box. Only one child chose to make their caterpillar look like the one in the book, everyone else chose their favorite colors. 

On "apple" day, I mixed in some counting apples and leaves manipulatives with a basket full of foam leaf beads, and also hid the MGT "Aa" apples in the basket for the kids to find. They made groups of three, and also used ice cube trays to make leaf & apple patterns.

Another favorite of "apple" day was in the introduction of the MGT story book, "Johnny" about Johnny Appleseed. There are SO many meaningful learning opportunities embedded in this book! My students were excited to learn about maps and different states in America. There's so many ways to differentiate number concepts in the illustrations. We counted groups of three, groups of five, and some of older students (5 years old) very quickly grasped counting multiples of 5 (apples on the tree) and 10 all the way up to 30. They thought Johnny Appleseed was a pretty cool guy!

Friday it was off to the Kobe Fruit and Flower Park to do a little apple picking ourselves! The park has beautiful flowers, grand buildings, a Koi pond, a go-cart track, and a play ground, as well as peach, pear, plum, grape, and apple orchards that are open for public picking. The trees are pruned so that fruit is easily accessible for people of all heights. Before I released them pick their apples, I reminded them about good fruit and bad fruit (from our Fruit of the Spirit devotional) and we talked about checking to make sure only the good fruit was chosen. They were so proud of their apple harvest! 

After they picked the apples, we all got to sit down for a little taste test. Fuji apples, fresh off the tree in Japan, are nothing short of heavenly! 

"Kairu sensei, it's so yum!"

It was hard work, exhausting, and fun. Everyone got to take an apple home to eat with their family and share about their day in orchard. 

Play With Words

We are in the throws of learning all about the parts of a tree. Between our school sports day, the officially Sports Day holiday and me being in Hong Kong for 3 days last week, we lost a bit of instructional time and are still working our way through week 1 of this months unit In The Orchard. Today we did "Day 4", all about what grows on tree branches.

At morning meeting, we listened to the Months of the Year song on our new Mother Goose Time CD, which talks about the rings of the tree growing each year, which was a great segue into the science activity we missed last Thursday, mostly due to teacher error (as in, I read the directions in the teacher planning guide and they did not compute) Thankfully, I received some very helpful feedback from a few other MGT users over the weekend, so we had a much more successful learning experience about tree trunks today (teacher included!). 

We reviewed the previous parts of the tree we have learned so far and I was quite surprised when I mentioned roots, and one student responded immediately with "R-O-O-T-S!", the Day 2 song that's been nearly 2 weeks since we sang it.  Today's song was about things that grow on the branches of a tree, so after the "red apple" part, I asked the kids to give me examples of other fruits that grow on trees. 

I pulled the "fruit of the Spirit" story pieces that corresponded with the fruit that was mentioned, one of them being "red cherries". Several students immediately identified the word "joy" on the cherry. I asked if they wanted to learn a new song about joy, and they were very eager. I learned this song as missionary kid many years ago, in 3 rounds and after some research, it appears that it might be a combination of a couple different songs. Rather than trying to teach 9 preschoolers to sing 3 different things at the same time, I just picked the 2 easy parts and did a "girls" verse and a "boys" verse. It was super cute!

             

     Girls: "J is for Jesus, O is for Others, Y y y y y y is for You, you, you, you, you, you"

     Boys: "Joy, joy, joy...I've got joy, joy, joy...I've got joy, joy, joy...I've got joy, joy, joy"

They did such a great job writing the letter "A-a" in their Little Journals today, and came up with really creative pictures and words that start with "A". 

Some mighty, green angels

A is for "Anju" (her BFF in class)

Before story time, I scoured the book shelves in the upstairs hallway for some tree/fall/harvest science related books, and also chose Apple Banana Cherry for our read aloud book, since it tied so nicely into everything we talked about today. It just so happens that the author's name is Joy, which was possibly their most exciting discovery of the day!  

Ah, the joy of learning in preschool! :)

Hello There, October!

It's October 1st. The days are getting shorter, the temperature is getting cooler, the leaves are changing colors, and it's time for a new theme! Yesterday we opened our Mother Goose Time box for "In The Orchard" and checked out some of the new items we will be adding to our morning meeting wall. My littles were ready to jump right in with "Day 1" today!

The first week of this month's curriculum is all about the life-cyle of a tree, so of course we started with a seed. There was lots of good discussion about what fruit has seeds and which ones do/do not grow on trees. I introduced our new Bible verse and story, which is about "good fruit" and "bad fruit". For previous themes before MGT curriculum was introduced, I tried to find a song for devotional time that would help the children learn their verse, so they were happy that this routine has continued with the Truth Tunes CD.  There was also lots of excitement about the ring that holds the daily theme related songs for the whole month. Today's song about seeds was sung to the tune of "Do You Know the Muffin Man". This song is one of their favorites, so of course they also HAD to sing the song with the original words, too!

During centers, everyone had a chance to investigate different kinds of seeds with a magnifying glass, and they counted and sorted with pinchers into ice cube trays however they saw fit. I was impressed that they were able to identify the pumpkin seeds (because pumpkin seeds are sold differently in Japan - without the crunchy outer shell, so they are green) and the sunflower seeds right away.

Since I had just pulled out the calendar numbers, but hadn't yet laminated anything to hang up, I used the calendar as the math center activity, and asked each group to work together to put the numbers in the correct order. Some of my little smarty pants even figured out the new pattern without me even asking about it.

We finished up My Little Jounal for Fables and Folktales by drawing a picture of the favorite character at the writing center. The winners were Mommy Crab & little crab, the tortoise, and the lion and mouse. Everyone got to choose a new name tag to write their name. It's amazing to see the progress from the same activity last month!

For science and sensory, I brought an apple to school to share. We all crowded around one table and passed the apple around and talked about how it looked, felt, smelled, etc. I cut the apple into 4 large sections so we could get all the seeds out, and then I passed around one section so they could observe and talk about the difference between the inside and outside of the apple. I even threw a little bit of multiplication in when I showed them that by cutting the remaining three sections of the apple into 3 pieces each, there were 9 pieces: enough for each student to have 1 piece. They thought that was amazing how it worked out. Last, but not least we counted all the apple seeds together.

Counting apple seeds is serious business!

The art project will have to carry over to tomorrow, since we ran out of time after one small group. I loved the low prep activity, and they turned out super cute!

All my kiddos were super engaged and on-task today, and looking forward to more new things to learn about tomorrow. I was proud of myself that we actually accomplished all the activities listed for Day 1 in the Teacher Planning Guide. Teacher success!