Apples and Leaves

Sometime ago, I said I wanted to post on Aiden's blog the particular theme we're working on. I'm finally getting around to it and I'll start with what we're doing now then go back as time allows and post the others. I hope to keep these up as a recurring post everytime we start something new. This is good documentation for Aiden's journey, but I hope it helps others too. If you have anything to add (activities, songs, etc), please leave them in the comments section for all to see!

With fall in the air, what a better time to work on the two things that remind me most of this beautiful season - apples and leaves. We started with apples/fruits about a month ago, but added in leaves. We're slowly moving on to pumpkins/Halloween for our next theme.

Theme: Apples and Leaves

Vowel Variety: oo, yum, oh, wow, up, down, fall, ah, pretty

Functional Words in Phrases: cut, peel, more, bite, crunchy, smooth, down, uh-oh, eat, pick, pour ... etc.

Activities:

Play farm/store/baby with apples

Cut up an apple and look at the core, seeds, stem, apple slices

Use half the cut apple and apple slices, dip in paint, and press onto paper.

Make an apple pie and/or apple butter

Go apple picking and/or visit a Farmer's Market

Separate the apples or leaves into big and small

Go on a walk and watch the leaves fall from the trees and hear them crunch under our feet

Play in a pile of leaves talking/singing about throwing them "up, up, up" then watching them fall down, down, down and hearing them "crunch, crunch, crunch".

Collect all shapes, sizes, and colors of leaves then bring them home to use in song play, books, arts/crafts, etc.

Print out apple/leaf clip art to color

and ... climbing trees with dad

Books:

• Up, Up, Up! It's Apple Picking Time, by Jody Fickes Shapiro
• Apples, Apples!, by Salina Yoon
• Apples, by Gail Gibbons
• Leaves, Leaves!, by Salina Yoon
• Leaves, Leaves, Leaves!, by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace
• It's Fall!, by Linda Glaser

Songs/Finger Plays:

Falling Apples (to the tune of London Bridges)
This is Aiden's favorite song for both apples and leaves (just replace apples with leaves) I use real leaves and real apples and do the motions as we sing.

See the apples falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
See the apples falling down,
Down to the ground.
Pick the apples and throw them up,
throw them up, throw them up.
Pick the apples and throw them up,
Up to the sky

Applesauce (to the tune of Yankee Doodle)
Peel an apple, cut it up
Cook it in a pot, When you taste it
You will find, it's applesauce you've got!

Apples/All the Leaves are Falling (to the tune of Are You Sleeping?)
Apples are falling, apples are falling,
From the tree, from the tree.
Pick up all the apples, pick up all the apples,
One, two three. One, two, three.

Five Little Apples (similar to Five Little Pumpkins or Five Little Monkeys)
Five little apples hanging on a tree
The farmer didn't care
So guess who came to eat?
A caterpillar! Munch, munch, munch!
Repeat four more times using a different animal
(again, I use real apples and leaves and whatever toy animals/puppets I have. It's a lot of fun singing this with the names of people in your family too!)

We sing all these songs with props and Aiden is very active in it. He likes making the animals eat the apples and the leaves or picking up the leaves and throwing them in the air! Another idea is to use a felt board if you have one and use cut out felt apples and leaves.

With this theme, he's voiced apple a couple of times. I don't even know how to spell how he says it, but it's more of just the vowels "a - le" without too much of the /l/. I just can't get him to say that dang /p/! Whenever he sees an apple he does say "mmmmm" and rubs his belly! When I ask where the leaves are, he'll look up in the tree or throw his hands up.