Friday, September 27, 2013

Apple Stamp Learning - A Fall Mini-Unit



As a reward for helping me pick the last of our apples, and as a way of using up the "good" half a few the birds had sampled, I covered the table in butcher's paper...


...and poured fall colored paint onto paper plates...


 ...for the girls to use for apple stamping.  They had a great time decorating the table.  And, as a bonus, their artwork turned out to be a pretty good backdrop for a lot of learning the next day...


...when the children labeled the different colored apples in the languages they are studying giving us a chance to discuss adjective placement and gender agreement.


Then, C (age 7) numbered the apples, while E (age 8) followed along printing out the number words in English, followed by D (age 10) with Spanish number words, A (age 12) and G (age 14) with French, and T (age 16) with German - which really was more like a multi-lingual spelling challenge than language learning, but good all the same.


When they got tired of that, they switched over to each child counting all of one color of apple (with T double checking the totals)...


 ...for the younger children to graph, with M&M's representing the paint colors (blue taking the place of "mixed paint" stamps)...


 ...while their older sibs reviewed the concepts of mean, median, mode, range, and percents with the same data.


We switched gears, and brainstormed adjectives describing the different colors of apples (ie. common for red, sour for green, sweet for yellow, rotten for brown, unnatural for orange, and so on) printing the words out in matching colors of crayon to the apples we were describing.


And finally, while we waited for an apple pie (made with the apples the birds didn't get) to come out of the oven, we passed the time spotting ink blot style pictures in the stamps - like the dinosaur below, crying over a lost tooth.


It's great to be a homeschooler.

4 comments:

Natalie PlanetSmarty said...

Funny how one thing leads to another when given enough time and enough enthusiastic learners.

An Almost Unschooling Mom said...

Natalie - It helps that it's fall. With all the colors, and smells, and tastes...it's hard not to be enthusiastic.

Christy Killoran said...

Wow! You never cease to amaze me. That's just brilliant, and fun too!

I like T's shirt.

Ticia said...

What a great series of learning activities that all started with a simple stamping activity.

I had to laugh at the "use the good bits" and the birds. The one summer I almost succeeded with a garden, the birds got the tomatoes before we did.