Five things I did with my apple unit

Hello everyone! 

Today, I'm linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching for her weekly Five for Friday Linkup!
This week, we celebrated learning about apples! :)  I was super excited to introduce STEAM stations to my students and parents!  Our school has been a STEAM school for two years.  We try to incorporate STEAM style activities as often as we can! :)  My goal with this set of lessons was to have both the parents and students engaged at 100%, so, I put them in rotations for an hour and 15 minutes.  The kids had a blast, and the parents did too! :)

We read several 'applecentric' texts! :)

   

We did five different STEAM styled rotations! :)
STEAM stands for SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, ART, and MATHEMATICS.

One of my favorite things I did with the kids was this cool apple glyph from my buddy Jen over at First Grade Blue Skies! :) This combined my A for art and my M for Math! :)

 I switched up her glyph idea a little bit when I did it with my kids...because I wanted to do the happy face version of the apples! :) Her pack has several other cool ideas that you can read about on this post.  Thanks, Jen for such a fun way to work on Math! :) XOXO

For the science part, we did an experiment called 'No Brown Apples for Me'! :)  I told the kids all about how I hated brown apples in my lunch box when I was their age...and how my mom solved the problem for me! :)  We tried out several different household liquids, and made predictions on which ones would keep the apples from turning brown over the course of the day! It was so much fun! :)  The kids thought the smell of vinegar was pretty awful, and they tried to 'trick' me into thinking it was water to see if I'd smell it! LOL!  Hilarious! #Iwasntbornyesterday

For the technology part, we watched a Brain Pop on Johnny Appleseed and did the quiz.  We are also going to graph the data from our experiment as well!:)
Our E was to build stable structures with bits of apple.  Each student was given some apples and some toothpicks and they were tasked with making it stable enough to hold some quarters! :)  They did a great job, and I saw tons of creativity! :)

An apple snack that I LOVE is apples with whipped cream cheese, caramel sauce, and heath chips! :) I put it together in front of the kids so that I would have the foundation for a shared writing experience!  We are still working on wrapping that up, but...I'm going to do a post on apple writing for you as soon as it's done so that you can see our process! Super proud of this year's writers! :)

If you are interested in linking up...don't forget to visit Doodlebugs Blog! :)