Apple Week

We had a blast with apple week this year! We spent every afternoon learning about apples, Johnny Appleseed, and incorporating apples into all types of activities!

Practicing math with apples from Sunny Days in Second Grade. After we made our apples, we cut them up and took turns putting them back together. Their favorite part? The fact that they got to use markers to go over the pencil! It is the little things...

After we read a poem and several books on Johnny Appleseed, we used this freebie to show what we had learned. Since we read everything from tall tales to non-fiction, the focus was pulling facts out of all the stories. They did great! 

Ready to eat apples! I saved apple week until I hit this lesson in our math curriculum. Granny smith apples won by a landslide, much to my distaste. Gala apples are my personal favorite!

  

Applesauce! Not the most attractive thing to photograph, but oh my goodness, it was SOOOO good! We wrote a recipe and mixed it together in the morning, then let it cook all day. My classroom smelled incredible all day long. We cooked in the crock-pot on high for a few hours, then on low until almost the end of the day. My kiddos ate every last bite! We made a graph about who liked it and who didn't, but it wasn't a very helpful graph because everyone said they liked it. 

The hallway this week. I adore the ease of changing these out! It takes about two minutes, and then the hallway looks totally different! 

Monster Bookmarks

Last semester I student taught in fourth grade. I loved my students, they were the sweetest kids! Fourth grade was older than I wanted, but I ended up really enjoying my time with them. At the end of my 12 weeks, I wanted to do something for them, but 48 kids is a lot of gifts to give! (I saw two classes of 24 each day, so 48 total). I ended up deciding to make each student a bookmark and give them a cool pencil. But not just any bookmark would do! I decided to copy the ones I found on Tally's Treasury.

Well, it was a much larger undertaking than I thought! I ended up making 50 of them, but it took SIX HOURS. Yes, a literal 6 hours. Some friends and I made them for our students and watched movies, which made the time go faster. But it still took quite a while. I ended up doing them a bit differently then the instructions simply because I was making so many. I basically just cut out a few steps. Scroll down to see what I mean!

The aftermath of the table. So much clean up! 

 Even at an artsy angle, a messy table still looks like a mess! 

Our finished bookmarks! 

See, a little different, but still adorable! 

Demonstrating how the bookmark can go over another page. 

Most of my bookmarks! I love that each one is different. I made sure there no two bookmarks were identical. On the back of each one I wrote the student's name so there would be no mix up. 

My kiddos loved them! I went and visited them a few weeks ago and several kids showed me the bookmark in their independent reading book. I'm glad I was able to give them something cute, inexpensive (though time consuming!), and practical. If I have time this summer, I think I will make one for each of my students for next year as birthday gifts.