Today was another apple day with my preschoolers. We read the book 10 Red Apples by Pat Hutchins again and used the numbered apples like we did in this post. Then we made the apples pictured above using the idea I found here.
We used red paper (our color of the week), plain white paper plates, glue, a small brown paper stem, and a green paper leaf. Instead of tearing all the paper I allowed the children to use scissors last Friday to cut it into pieces for this project. This was a good opportunity to use scissors without worrying about staying on the lines. It was also nice to do this project in two sessions.
I had quite a few of these laminated apples (Inherited from a retired teacher.), so I decided to write a capital and lowercase “A” on a few. Then I punched some holes around the edges. A length of red ribbon taped on one end served as both needle and thread for this lacing activity. This is was a good exercise for fine motor skills as well as letter and color recognition.
The last activity I want to share with you is an apple fishing game I made up. My grandma gave me a box of twelve plastic apples years ago. I never knew what to do with them until now. I used half of a pipe cleaner, wrapped it around each stem, and fashioned it into a hook. I numbered each apple with a permanent marker for number recognition practice.
For a pole I took a dowel rod and tied some twine to the end. Then I made a loop at the other end to “hook” the apples. Each child fished for two apples and we read the number on the apples they “caught”. The children had so much fun with this that we played it twice and will play it again on Friday.
Friday we will wrap up our study of the letter “A” and the color red.
