It’s almost Fall on the calendar and in our neck of the woods means it’s Apple season! We will soon be going to a local family’s orchard in order to pick all the apples we want for free! We’ve done this for the last three or four years and have canned apple butter and applesauce to enjoy once Winter set’s in. Since Big Red is in Kindergarten I felt it would be a great time to add some STEM learning into our Kindergarten schedule.
I came up with a very simple STEM activity which includes weighing and measuring apples and recording our results on a Apple STEM Measurement printable (which you can get free by joining our email list!) All you need are 2-4 apples, a pencil, a flexible measuring tape, and a small scale. We just happen to own all of these things at our house. We had trouble tracking down our dressmaker’s tape but used one of the paper measuring tapes that the hospital gives out at births!
Big Red and his daddy did this STEM apple activity together so that I could take the pictures. First Big Red selected 4 apples from our basket of apples. Next we labeled each apple so we could keep them orderly. We used small square Post-It notes which we had just bought last night at the grocery store.
We decided to weigh each apple first with the small hand sized gram scale that I had bought for just this type of thing. I wanted a small portable scale to take with us for hiking and other nature investigations.
After each apple was weighed we measured how high each one was with a wooden ruler. Daddy recorded each number after Big Red told him what the number was. This was a great time to talk about half inches versus whole inches.
The last activity that we did was find out how big the apples were around aka circumference. We used the cm side of the flexible paper tape measure.
I asked Big Red to draw each apple in the boxes on the free printable. He did a pretty good job for a tired 5 year old who had just experienced his first day of homeschool co-op
If you’d like to get your own copy of our Apple STEM Measurement Investigation printable remember to just subscribe and confirm your email! Thanks so much I hope you enjoy!
I am super excited to share with you a brand new monthly series all about Kindergarten. This monthly blog hop will include a monthly theme and include a variety of subjects geared to the 4 year to 6 year old learning levels. I have partnered with other KBN bloggers to create a mini unit study of sorts for any parent, caregiver, teacher or homeschool to use as a reference. We hope that you enjoy these posts each month and share some new ways to learn about that month’s topic.
Art – Apple Fingerprint Art by Kidz Activities
Field Trip – Apple Picking Field Trip Activities by Rainy Day Mum
Fine Motor – Fine Motor Color Matching Apple Sensory Bin by The Resourceful Mama
Free printables – Fun Fall Apple Tree Reading Log by Books and Giggles
Math- Apple Fractions and Tasty Snack by Local Busy Bees
Music- Apple Song for ESL Students by Creative World of Varya
Phonics – Apple Alphabet Match by Adventures of Adam
Reading- Secrets of the Apple Tree Book and Sight Word Game by Umbrella Tree Cafe
Science- Kindergarten STEM Apple Activity {with Free Printable} by Something 2 Offer
Writing – Apple name printable by P is for Preschooler
This will come in very handy when my son is older. He loves visiting Nana’s orchid!
There’s so much you can learn from apples! Best of all – you can eat them when you’re done with the investigation! 😉
What a great way to blend a fall activity with learning. I’ve done this activity with pumpkins before but we always have apples in our fridge so we will be trying this out soon. I think my son will think it is super cool to use a ruler to measure his favorite fruit. 🙂
Amy,
We have never done this with apples or pumpkins but we have 4 pumpkins from our garden on the table, lol. Guess pumpkins will have to be next!
Oh, yes… We do eat lots of apples during the year! I cannot wait to go apple picking.
We love the apple orchard each year! About three years ago we found out that one of our church members has an orchard and we now get them for free. He has the biggest yummiest Red Delicious apples.
Great way for kids to learn making detailed observations. 😄
I love this idea and I’m going to print this out to try with my 5 year old. When I try this with her, since you’ve included weighing the apple, I will probably include figuring out how much each apple would cost at the store. Even if she doesn’t get the math just yet, my reasoning would be so she understands a bit better the cost of an apple, and hopefully how we don’t want to waste apples, as that would be like throwing money away. 🙂
How fun and something even Charlie can do and would enjoy. And we can even use different Fruits to mix things up.