"Marvelous Maths Day": An apple thematic unit
Did you know that apples came in three colours? Most of us didn't realise that we had brought in yellow apples and not green!
We began our day by listening to an information text about apples. We learned about how apples grow, when they are harvestes, how they are stored and that they come in three colours.
Our favourite fun fact was that apples grow from the flowers of the apple blossom. Turn your apple upside down to see the remains of the flower. Cool or what?!!!!!!!
Graphing Activities
We began by graphing our apples to determine the most popular colour. As you can see from below, red apples are a clear favourite among the class.
Next we studied our apples to see if they had a stem or not and created a graph based on this information. We predicted that we would have more apples without a stem, which turned out to be incorrect!
Graphing by colour Graphing by presence of a stem
Sorting/Classification Activities
An apple set was created and then further refined by sorting apples by type: Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and Galia. We learned that different types of apples grow on different types of apple trees. We noted that the red set had more, just as the red line was the longest when we graphed the colours.
Apple Set Colour/Type Sets
Weighing Activity
Next we looked at our partners apple and guessed who had the heaviest apple. To determine the correct answer we measured them both using a balance. We also had a competition to see who had the heaviest and lightest apple.
We taste three apples and compared them using the following attributes:
Taste testing determined the green apple to be tart and the others to be sweet.
The Little Red House with no windows, no doors, and a star inside
The class listened to the story of The Little Red House with great enthusiasm. None of them could guess what the house was before the story was read. I wonder if any of you can? Why not ask your child for the answer?
Apple Glyph Activity
Glyphs are a pictorial representations of data collection. It was a fun activity to wrap up our day. Each child pasted cutouts onto the sheet that were determined by their answers to the questions posed. By reading the code and referring to the picture, individual codes can be cracked and the answers determine. Fun or what??!!!!!! They are currently on display in the corridor outside our classroom. Next time you are passing by see if you interpret them.
