Fruit activities – Day 1 – Raising Truffles

Fruits! Such an exiting theme this week because not only are we getting to do crafts, and learn some stuff, but we are also going to be eating a pretty exciting array of different fruits, some of which the boys have never tried before.

The grocery person shopping and delivering my groceries for this week must have thought IU was a complete lunatic as she looked at my list. Some fruits we buy every week, oranges, bananas, strawberries, apples, tomatoes etc. This week I added one of 15 other fruits. One plum, one kiwi, one honeydew melon etc. I then left a note asking if they could not be put into bags. I may be a weirdo who orders one of everything, but I’ll be dammed if I’m responsible for 15 plastic bags being used.

On to the good stuff! Today for craft we made apple cores! This was such a blissfully easy craft, and whilst the glue dried we ran around on the deck like lunatics playing Marco Polo. Highly recommend!

For the craft you will need

Wider popsicle sticks
Red, green, and brown craft paper
glue
scissors
Something circular to draw around
black sharpie

First up I told the boys to choose between green and red paper for their apples. Luckily they chose different ones so we didn’t end up with twin crafts. I drew around a jar on both of their papers, then they cut their circles out. Once they’d done that we chopped the circles in half, and I took a moment to go over halves and wholes with them again quickly. We covered it a lot when we were telling time a couple of weeks ago, but it’s always good to go back over stuff.

Once they’d got two semi circles I told them to choose one to be the top of the Apple. Then they glued on a little brown stalk that I’d cut out, and a green leaf. Then they glued three popsicle sticks on. Onto the bottom half of the circle they glued the other end of the popsicle sticks. We then had to wait for the glue to dry. The perfect opportunity for us to spill 200 hotwheels cars all over the playroom, then get upset that the toys were all over the floor, then all three boys decide they only want to play with one specific car, which is ALWAYS the same one. The usual joyous lesson in sharing that we go through daily. After our argument we regrouped, turned over our apples once dry and used a sharpie to draw on some seeds, and that was it! So easy, it looked so cute, and it was relatively mess free.

Because it was the start of our week on fruits we started pretty big for academic time. There wasn’t really a formal learning goal. It was more conversational discussion of fruits and all the different ones out there.

I drew a large chart on paper all over the kitchen table. With 20 different squares. In each square I wrote: name, inside color, outside color, and where from. The boys then took it in turns to choose a fruit from the pile in the kitchen and put it in a square. They then had to write (or we wrote for Ted) the name of the fruit. They knew pretty much all of them aside from kiwi, that they thought might be a teeny tiny coconut! Then they easily identified the outside color. They had a pretty good success rate on the inside color, although there was a bit of an argument about whether the inside of a banana was white, or very very light yellow. William loves a detail.

For our final section we paused and discussed how fruit gets to us. I had a pretty fab video for the boys to watch about harvesting fruit. We talked about locally grown stuff, and why it might be better to eat things that came from near by. We then looked at the packaging or label for each fruit to discover where it had come from. Very few were actually from the USA, a fact that made me feel very guilty about our food miles. I found an informative article from Sustainable America for me to read to the kids about it (linked below). I’m going to work more on that, I have a friend who gets a local fruits and veggies box every week, and she’s offered to pick one up for me as the farm is quite a distance from our house. I think it’ll be fab. We ended with having an apple, (one of our few local-ish fruits!) and all agreed that we couldn’t wait to try all the others throughout the rest of the week.