September means back-to-school and fall festivities. Here are a few of our favorite apple-themed crafts and learning activities!
Your students will have fun with this paper plate apple core craft. We used paint to color the apples, but markers or crayons would work great too. Students can also glue black beans (or real apple seeds) for a 3D craft.
This classic paper plate apple craft helps develop a variety of skills as your students cut or tear the tissue paper before gluing it onto paper plates. Add a face to the apple for even more fun!
Paint apples in an apple tree using wine corks to stamp red paint. Preschool students will enjoy stamping while older students can cut their own trees to stamp. Enhance the learning activity by adding in some math. Draw a handful of trees on a large roll of paper and write numbers or math equations on the tree trunk to determine how many apples should get stamped.
Another fun way to paint and count with apples is to use the seeds. Have your students roll dice to determine the number of seeds, then paint apple seeds using black paint and Q-tips. Use multiple dice to challenge older students!
We also use Q-tips with an apple theme to paint apple arrays in trees. If your students aren’t ready for multiplication, this can be easily modified to use addition, subtraction or simply counting.
Math talks never get old! You can step up critical thinking and make your conversations more hands-on by allowing your students to use bingo chips for the apples. Allow your students to pick apples from the trees or drop them from the branches down to the grass and think through the various number sentences that can be formed by doing so.
If you would like to practice odd and even numbers, grab your sticker dots and a deck of cards with the face cards removed. Challenge your students to draw a card and place a red sticker for odd numbers and a green sticker for even numbers in the tree. Students can decorate each apple by adding a stem and leaf. If you are able to work in small groups there are many opportunities for additional math conversations (eg. How many total apples are in the tree? Are there more green apples or red apples in the tree?).
Another fun way to use red sticker dots as apples is to challenge your students to count 100 apples. I draw ten trees on paper and challenge students to fill each tree with 10 apples. To add an additional math boost, we use two dice to determine how many apples are added each round. Want to add a little competition? Make it a race! This is an excellent activity for counting and visualizing place value.
If you have access to dominos in your classroom, challenge your students to put apple seeds on apples by matching the dominos to the corresponding numbers. This activity can be modified depending on your student’s learning abilities. As shown here, I challenged my daughter to add together two domino face sums. I also wrote single domino sums on the apples for my younger learner.
Our final apple-themed activity is a combo of two crafts: a handprint tree and finger-painted apples. My children used sponges to paint the leaves on the trees after they had traced, cut, and glued their handprints to the paper. I turned this into a two-day project by letting the trees dry before adding the apples with finger paint. This makes a sweet keepsake for open house visits!
Enjoy the apple-themed learning!
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