Toddler School: Apples, Apples, Apples

We love apples around here! I'm pretty sure I could fill an entire month with apple activities. I had a really hard time narrowing down the activities I wanted to do for this week, but I decided to do a balance of favorites and new activities!

If you're new around here, here's the run down on how I toddler school:
- I do weekly themes with my little ones
- All activities are adaptable to meet your kiddos wherever they are
- Each activity is play-based and focuses on the development areas of your little one
- I do one activity a day (usually) that lasts around 20-30 minutes

I'm not going to lie - this week has been a challenge to get everything done! Between coming off of the flu, Cohen starting preschool and Avery getting his 2 year molars it has been a tricky balancing act for sure. 

Here's what we did this week:

You can get my blank thematic planner here.

Books:

I did not take a picture of our bookshelf this week - oops! But here are a few of our faves!

Bad Apple: A Tale of Friendship

by Edward Hemingway

Up, Up, Up! IT’s Apple Picking TIme

by Jody Fickes Shapiro and Kitty Harvill

Ten Apples Up on Top

by Theo LeSieg

Apples, Apples, Apples

by Elizabeth Wallace

Apple Picking Day!

by Candice Ransom and Erika Meza

Activities:

Apple Pie Sensory:

This sensory table smells AH-mazing! Dry oats, apple/cinnamon potpourri (for smell of course), measuring cups, apples (fake or real) and pie tins! We made lots of apple pie this week!

For added skill practice I would ask for specific pies: only red apples or 1 red and 2 yellow. You get the idea! Make it fun and educational at the same time!

ABC Apple Sticker Tree:

Stickers - a crowd favorite for sure! I made 2 different trees to accommodate both the boys skills and abilities.

Avery (2): Letter matching. For him I just did capital letters so they were an exact match. He has about 90% of his uppercase letters down now so I will start introducing the corresponding lowercase letter soon! Avery was not a fan of the stickers. Every time it got stuck on his head he would say "no". It cracked me up! He had me put the stickers on and he pointed to where the matching letter was. 🤣

Note: If you follow my IG stories, you know that I always say the letter name AND sound together to start forging that connection. So when I say he knows his letter names, he is also learning the sounds simultaneously.

Cohen (4): To extend the activity for Cohen we did -all words! He changed out the beginning sound with stickers to create new -all words. He is a really strong reader but doesn't have a strong grasp on rhyming yet so I am working on rhyming and word families with him.

Indoor Apple Picking:

This activity was a big hit! To set up: Tape off a tree on the floor and add apples (paper, plastic, real - it doesn't matter!) Call out an apple for your little one to "pick". (Ex. Pick a green apple. Pick a small apple. Pick an apple with a worm in it.)

To make it extra cute you could even provide them with an apple picking basket to collect their apples in!

Homemade Applesauce:

We went real apple picking too! However our favorite u-pick had closed for the season so we couldn't actually pick anything - bummer! But we did grab some fresh apples while we were there! So we used those to make some homemade applesauce.

I love getting my little ones involved in the kitchen and food prep whenever possible. I think it is a really important skill that is often overlooked these days (in my childhood included). This recipe is super simple and your kiddos get to do all the work fun!

Here's how to make it:

1. Peel and boil apples ahead of time until soft

2. Place apples in a ziploc bag

3. Add 1 tsp. lemon for every 2 apples

4. Add cinnamon to taste (optional)

5. Let your little one squish the apples in the bag! Shake. Squeeze. Stomp. Anything goes!

6. Scoop out and enjoy!

It really is that easy and my boys loved it!

Apple Sorting:

I am a big fan of sorting activities and I like to incorporate them into most of my themes! I just love all the skills they use for this simple activity! For this one I hid our apples around the house so the boys had to seek them out first and then they got to sort. 

For Avery (2): We sorted by color

For Cohen (4): We sorted by rhyming words

The best part? Just re-hide and replay as many times as you'd like!

STEM Apple Tree:

We busted out our building and problem solving skills with this fun STEM activity. I'm going to be honest with you, we don't do nearly as many STEM activities and I wish we did. I'm going to try to incorporate 1 a week from now on, but we will see how that goes.

Materials:

TP roll

Green Popsicle Sticks

Red Poms

For this one the challenge was easy: build an apple tree that could hold all 6 apples. It was really cute (and impressive) watching the boys problem solve as they learned about balancing and weigh distribution. I was really impressed to see the many different trees they created!

That's a wrap! No printables this week!

Up next week: Fall Leaves 🍂🍁

Confessions from Toddler School: Apples! Apples! Apples!

Does anyone else get sick just thinking about back to school!? And by sick I don't mean nauseas-becasue-you're-not-ready-and-your-to-do-list-is-a-mile-long sick (although there was a decent share of that as well) I mean like the worst cold of your life sick. Runny nose, head pressure, cough, sore throat...the works. I swear I get sick every year during the first week of school (even when I haven't been in the classroom for 3 years...). It's like my body knows!

But we didn't let a little sickness stop us from doing our favorite theme: APPLES 🍎🍏🍎 

Here's what we did this week:

You can get my blank thematic planner here.

Books:

I love apples so much - just looking at our bookshelf made me so excited all week! All of these books were super cute and fun to read but our favorite was definitely Apple Picking Day by Samantha Brooke. I think this was partly because Cohen is reading himself now and he loved that he could read almost all the words by himself.

Activities:

Apple Orchard Sensory:

This sensory table turned out so much cuter than I expected AND got both boys engaged! That's a win! And given all the sickness going around we definitely needed a win!

This sensory table took less than 10 minutes to throw together. During nap I folded these origami "baskets", made some tp roll trees and dumped in our attribute apples! We use these bad boys all the time! If you don't have a set, you can get them here!

Label the Apple:

I am so impressed by how much my toddler schooling has done for Cohen's academics and I want to increase the difficulty and make more real world connections for him. Now that he is exceeding in math and reading, I want to start bringing in some more science and social studies for him. I have decided to incorporate an anchor chart every week to launch our theme and tie in some of these other pieces for our learning. 

I bought a roll of chart paper that I hang on the wall and I can prep anchor charts on it as needed. For this one I just drew a large apple and then hand wrote the labels at the bottom. When we were ready to interact with the chart I cut the words out, added tape and we labeled together! 

Simple, easy, effective!

Sight Word Tree:

This was one of my favorite activities this week! I used the same chart paper and made a tree outline. I wrote words that we've been practicing on the tree and on little dot stickers. I would hand Cohen one sticker at a time, he would read it and then find the matching word! 

He's even gone back to it several times to read the words even after the activity was over! Definitely good practice to help with his fluency!

Search and Find Apple Words:

This was probably Cohen's favorite activity all week! To prep this activity:

1. Cut out apples and laminate (this makes them dry erase so you can use over and over with different learning targets!👌)

2. Print out search and find worksheet - you can find that along with all the other resources used this week down below!

During his nap, I wrote some words on the apples and hid them all over the house! He was so excited when he woke up! I gave him his paper and crayons and he hunted all over the house to find the words. 

For an extra challenge little brother kept moving the apples so I had to hunt for them too! 🤣

Outings:

Apple Picking:

I am so excited about this new apple orchard we found just minutes from our house! It's a "short orchard" which means no ladders are necessary AND it's perfect height for kids of all ages. Cohen had so much fun picking the apples. We even learned how to pick them properly (twist not pull). We can't wait to use the apples for all kinds of fall inspired baking!

Want all of this week's printables and plans?  You can grab them here!

Up next week: Football  🏈