the apple orchard

On Friday we visited Chapin's Apple Orchard. It was an exciting morning full of rich information and juicy apples. We had a tour of the working orchard and learned about how apples grow, the age of the apples we ate, and observed trees at different stages. We also learned how to read an apple's story by noticing what part of the apple was facing the sun and what part of the apple was in the shade.

We walked on the paths with our wagon of apples, helped to make cider in an apple press, and learned the parts of a bee's body through an interactive song.

Thank you to our many chaperones for joining us for this learning experience!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Before we went. . .

We started a class teaching book about an apple orchard. Many of the children have visited Chapin's before with their families and had a lot of information to share. Our collaborative work connected to the teaching points in our writing workshop; writers picture a topic in their mind and use pictures and words to teach about that one topic. 

We pictured apple orchards in our minds and shared around the oval. We used our reflections to develop our book. We will finish our class teaching book of the orchard on Monday, now using what we gathered from our field trip to write our last two pages and add more detail.

The first page has pictures of the big, red barn at Chapin Orchard and pictures of apples and apple trees. It's important to look for the sign; apples this way!

On the second page we have pictures of a tractor with a wagon of apples in the back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




A is for apple. . .

I introduced a short apple poem full of words the children can read. It provided a beginning letter/sound, rhyming words, and an invitation to draw a round and sweet apple. During morning meeting the children read the poem together and some bravely read it on their own in front of their peer audience. Each child used a sticky note to write their name and draw an apple to go with our poem. They used the words from the poem to illustrate a round red or green apple.

 

 

After we went. . .

Going to the orchard provides an authentic and meaningful COUNTING, COMPARING, and GRAPHING opportunity!

When we returned from the orchard we fueled up with apple cider donuts and closely examined our picked apples. I asked children to notice what the apples looked like, the visible attributes.

What is the same or different about our apples? 
How could we sort our apples?

Their (brilliant!) noticings and ideas for sorting;

Some of the apples are slanted on top and some aren't.

I notice that some of the apples have long stems and some have short stems. 

Some apples don't have any stems and some do.

Some have been facing the sun more. Their skin is red or sunburnt like we learned!

All of the apples have red and green spots.

They are different sizes, some apples are really big and some are small and some are medium.

I listed their noticings and we voted on one way to sort our apples. The children voted to go with Sebby's idea; sorting our apples by size. We didn't use measuring tools to determine big, medium, or small. We used a visual, finding one apple that looked small and one that looked big and using those as our comparisons for sorting. Later in the year we will introduce measuring tools.

Once the children worked together to sort our apples we counted how many in each group. We talked about showing this information with numbers or with a graph. A graph is a visual way to show how many and to compare how many.

This was our first time thinking about graphs. We used a bar graph to show how many apples in each group and talked why it is called a bar graph. This is one way to show and compare. We talked about how to read our graph; What information is this graph giving you? What do you notice about this graph?