Second Grade Celebrates "Johnny Appleseed Day"!

Happy Johnny Appleseed Day!

 Everyone had a GREAT time today as we celebrated our first theme day: Johnny Appleseed Day! The Owls got to visit each second grade classroom and participate in an apple related activity! Last week we had learned about Johnny Appleseed himself, so today was all about those apples!

    Their first stop was next door to the kangaroo class to do some apple math with Mrs. Atherton! In there, students found the circumference and diameter of various apples, measured the length of a peel, and estimated how many seeds were hidden in the core.

    After that, it was time to examine apples as scientists with Mr. Saltus! Students investigated the follow questions: do apples sink or float? What happens when a sliced apple is left out? Why? Their investigations led to a LOT more questions! We'll need to take some more time to explore with apples in the future!

After their first two stops, they headed back to our classroom where they worked together to create homemade applesauce! A HUGE thank you to Mrs. Nash for helping us with this delicious endeavor. Many thanks to YOU all as well, for donating an apple to make this possible!!! Students helped core and slice the apples, placed them in the crockpot, added some water and sugar, and then set on high for 3 hours (although, we ended up turning the crockpot to low for the last hour!).

While the applesauce was cooking, 2H headed to their next activity. In Ms. Donlon's room, after watching a musical version of the Dr. Seuss' story Ten Apples Up On Top, they worked hard on completing number models to represent each number 1-10. They then created their own portraits balancing 10 apples on their heads!

    Next up was the Giraffe classroom where students had to listen very carefully to follow Ms. Riley's directed drawing of Johnny Appleseed himself! 

     After lunch, we were welcomed back into our classroom by the delicious wafting smell of our applesauce! While it cooled, we completed our first Mystery Science exploration which had us thinking about why some apples are red and some apples are green. This led us into to discovering how today's farmers end up with the biggest, sweetest, juiciest apples! Ask your child about this discovery. The natural next step was to TASTE some of these yummy apples! After tasting three types of apples (granny smith, golden delicious, and pink lady), we created three "Apple-icious Adjective Trees"!

     FINALLY it was time to take the apples out of the crockpot, place them in the "masher", give it a turn, and enjoy our homemade snack! YUM!!

Bon appetit!

     I have to commend our Owl Class for all their excellent behavior and hard work. I received numerous compliments from the other second grade teachers. Way to go, Owls! Thanks for making Johnny Appleseed Day such a huge success!!!