Learning with Food: Apples!

As our school year is teetering to a close, we've adopted a more unschooling approach. I asked Aidyn what he'd like to learn next. Among the list that included insects and exploring the outdoors, he said he wanted to learn more about food and "the powers" (aka nutrients) that food gives us.

We started with apples. We loved the apple unit we did in September, but this time around we tried new activities.

We are using Gardening Wizardry for Kids as a guide for our food adventures.

 

We took an early morning walk to the grocery store and picked up a dozen apples, including 3 green apples, 3 yellow apples, and 3 red apples for an experiment back home.

We tried to guess which color apple would have the most seeds and the least seeds. We numbered 9 napkins, made a graph, and carefully cut open the apples and counted their seeds.

Turns out, with 19 seeds among the 3 cut open, the green apples had the most seeds, and the yellow had the least. This was a good chance for Aidyn to practice adding 3 numbers together at once.

Afterward, we read the apple section of Gardening Wizardry for Kids and learned about the apple's humble beginnings. We also read about pioneer games that involved apples when Aidyn decided he wanted to bob for apples!

He found it is much harder than it looks!

In the back section of Gardening Wizardry are pages of fun projects with food. We decided to give the fruit stamp painting project a try.

We re-watched How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, since our library doesn't have it. 

We also watched a Bill Nye the Science Guy episode on farming.

And a Magic School Bus episode on digestion.

We also used the Read, Build, Write! mats and cards from Homeschool Creations to learn fruit words. Here, Aidyn is reading, building and writing "lemon."

We had a blast revisiting an apple unit study! Next up: Avocados!