Fall is right around the corner which means Apple Day isn’t far behind! It’s the perfect time to make applesauce from scratch, learn who Johnny Appleseed was, and explore all the parts of an apple. If you’re ready, let’s get these Apple Day activities prepped!
Remember to save time for the library, too. Our media center is packed with books about apples, both fiction and nonfiction. The hard part is narrowing them down to a read-aloud stack we can manage. Honestly, we would need a few weeks to do all the ideas we have rolling around in our heads.
Some of our favorite books for Apple Day include:
- The Apple Orchard Riddle by Margaret McNamara
- Amelia Bedelia’s First Apple Pie by Herman Parish
- Johnny Appleseed by Lori Haskins Houran
- What’s So Terrible about Swallowing an Apple Seed? by Harriet Lerner
- The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall
- Apple Picking Time by Michele Benoit Slawson
- Apples by Erika L. Shores
- Apples for Everyone by Jill Esbaum
APPLE DAY ACTIVITIES
One of the first things we do on Apple Day is make applesauce from scratch. Don’t panic. It’s so easy, especially if you use a slow cooker. You’ll only need apples, sugar, cinnamon, and water… that’s it. And it’s delicious!
This student cookbook👆 explains step by step how to make the applesauce and it’s a great way to tie in procedural reading standards with your Apple Day activities. Start it first thing in the morning and it’ll be ready after lunch.
Your classroom is going to smell so good! Expect “visitors.”
Once your applesauce is going, you can start on another activity. This is a good time to tap into social studies by reading a beginning biography👇 about Johnny Appleseed.
Or teach the children how apple trees grow.👇 This informational text explains the life cycle of an apple tree using key words like seed, sprout, soil, roots, seedling, leaf, trunk, tree, blossom, and apple. If you have time, follow it up by labeling the parts of an apple. Apple Day science? Check.
APPLE DAY MATH
It’s important to get math skills into our Apple Day activities, too. We brainstormed a lot of ideas, but, knowing our students, we decided on these two. Our kids like to eat and they like to build things, so these were a no-brainer. I’m guessing yours aren’t much different.
Using toothpicks, apple flavored candies, and simple pictures of shapes, we challenged the children to construct 2D and 3D shapes. It was a fun way to review geometry standards as they worked together to make and build:
- squares / cubes
- triangles / triangular pyramids
- rectangles / rectangular prisms
If your students aren’t quite ready for the challenge of building three-dimensional shapes yet, try this alternative idea for math.👇 We used apple candy rings and skewers to make simplified versions of a rekenrek. With it, the kids could practice math facts within ten and list all the “ways to make ten.”
But this is our favorite Apple Day math.👇 A little while back, we got the idea for an apple tasting party from another teacher friend. We knew our kids would love taste-testing different apple items, but we also knew we’d have to beef up the educational value of it. Given the variety of things we were tasting, collecting and graphing data seemed like the most natural guided math choice for this activity.
The obvious question (or at least to us, lol) is…
- Which of these apple items do you like best?
And that leads to more curious questions like…
- Which apple item was the most popular in our class?
- Which was the least liked?
You could even record their predictions before starting the taste test.
A FEW MORE APPLE DAY ACTIVITIES
We have more Apple Day activities to share in this APPLE DAY SET for kindergarten and first grade classrooms. It includes the printables shared in this post along with other fun ideas to round out the day:
- Make a No-Bake Apple Pie Cup (It might even be better than the applesauce.)
- Read and Perform Funny Apple Jokes
- Write an Opinion Piece about the Best Variety of Fresh Apples
We haven’t included any crafts in the Apple Day activities set, but I’ve been collecting cute ideas on an Apple Day board on Pinterest. If you’re interested in looking through some of those, you can find them HERE.
These WOVEN APPLES are so cute and great for developing fine motor skills. And this one isn’t a craft, but we like this APPLE STACKING ACTIVITY from Little Bins for Little Hands. It’s a fun and funny challenge for the kids.
Whichever Apple Day activities you decide to do, I know the kids will have a great time! (But don’t skip the apple pie cup. You’ll thank me later.)
Until next time, happy teaching!
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