How To Make An Apple Pie and See The World

It has been quite a difficult week for structured work as Harry has been under the weather, tired and difficult so we have not done as much as planned. This has been our Five in a Row book this week and it worked out quite well that it is a fun one!

Amazon.co.uk
An apple pie is easy to make...if the market is open. But if the market is closed, the world becomes your grocery store. This deliciously silly recipe for apple pie takes readers around the globe to gather ingredients. First hop a steamboat to Italy for the finest semolina wheat. Then hitch a ride to England and hijack a cow for the freshest possible milk. And, oh yes! Don't forget to go apple picking in Vermont! A simple recipe for apple pie is included. 

We have been meaning to make a new batch of playdough for a while so we used some apple related playdough activities. I am always amazed how an unpromising pan of gloop turns into playdough after a few minutes on the hob! Harry remembered most of the ingredients we needed and enjoyed adding them all and stirring well.

He used playdough mats to create the letter 'a' and some apples on a tree.

I also asked him to find the word 'apple' on the front cover of the book, which he did immediately and then to make the word from his playdough letter cutters.

We looked at the life cycle of an apple using some nice Montessori resources. After reading a library book about plant life cycles, we put apple life cycle pictures into the right order. Harry put them in a straight line at first and couldn't decide whether to put the seed at the beginning or end, so we talked about why it is both the beginning and end. I then cut off the words and asked Harry to match them to the correct picture. He did this really well - I suspect he mainly uses the first letter of the word to work out what it is as he found 'seed' and 'seedling' more difficult!

Finally, we spent time over a couple of days creating a street art work, after looking at the picture of the street in the book where the market is located and all the buildings are very close together.

Firstly, we looked through some magazines and Harry cut out pictures that could represent various types of shop, including a bakery, toy shop and cafe. He painted a large piece of card blue for the sky and we tore up some stone coloured paper to use for the street. We then stuck the magazine pictures to luggage tags and lined them up to create our street.