Walk to School Day!

In my district (and it many other places), we have "Walk to School Day." It's a day where students walk to school to promote safe walking paths, healthy habits, etc. At my old school, only a few kids did it and they just walked about 2 short blocks. Not at my new school! Pretty much EVERYONE participates and our "route" is about 0.5 miles. Pretty impressive for Kindergarteners!

I started out by meeting my Kinders (Starbucks in hand) at the church half a mile from school. They were so excited!

Then we started walking. And walking. And walking. Half a mile is hard when you have 15 5-year-olds to keep up with! Thankfully I had several parents who joined us to help wrangle my "herd".

Here they are walking down the street, holding up our sign so people could find our class:

How cute?!?! For the most part, they had fun on the walk. Unfortunately, we had several meltdowns when we got to school. Nothing like a crazy start to the day! Luckily, this teacher pulled it all together and we ended up with some great memories!

Apple Unit!

The week before Fall Break I taught my "Apple Unit." Pretty much everything we did was about apples! And it made me want to integrate more thematic units into my daily lesson plans. Maybe a pumpkin unit in a few weeks?

We tasted 3 different types of apples and made a graph to see which was the class favorite. Here they are getting their samples:

And the taste testing begins!

After they tasted each piece, I gave them a picture of an apple to color according to which was their favorite:

I wish I had a picture of the finished graph! Red delicious were by far the class favorite, followed by Granny Smith (surprised me!) and Yellow delicious in a distant 3rd place. We love making graphs as a class and I love how great my kids have become at interpreting the data and drawing conclusions.

Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of our experiment when we "dissected" an apple. But we talked about the parts of an apple and then the kids labeled their own. They did great with it and were stretching out some tough words- flesh, skin, etc.

Next up- best part of the unit, applesauce day! We talked about the steps to make applesauce:

1. wash them 2. cut them 3 cook them 4. eat them

 1. wash 2. cut 3. sprinkle (because we "sprinkled" in cinnamon and sugar) 4. eat

 1. wash 2. cut 3. sugar and cinnamon 4. eat

Then for a fun math activity, we read 10 Apples Up on Top and made our own version. This was a great end of quarter assessment for me- which kids can write and put in order numbers 1-5 and those who still need help. 

We had a great apple-filled week! Tomorrow I return to school after a week-long break. And dare I say it? I'm actually ready to go back because I miss my kiddos!