Happy Fall Y'all! with My First Freebie!

Fall is my favorite, favorite, favorite time of year! I love how the air gets crisp and the leaves start to turn beautiful shades of red, yellow and orange. Here in Colorado, a quick drive up to the mountains is an easy way to see some brilliant colors in the aspen groves.

Aspen trees near St. Elmo, Colorado.

I also love all the Fall holidays! Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday. Who can resist a holiday that's all about spending time with friends and family and eating some amazing food??

Fall also means pumpkins, apple cider and starting to smell fireplaces in the air! In the spirit of fall, I thought I would link up (very, very late) with Cynthia at 2nd Grade Pad for her Happy Fall Y'all Linky Party!

Here's our fun fall activity:  

Applesauce Day! 

Each year, my mom (LOVE HER!) picks apples with one of her neighbors. She brings a ton into school which we chop up with my class and turn into crockpot applesauce. It is a huge hit every year and even kids who normally don't like applesauce love it!

My beautiful mom!

I know this doesn't seem like it's in any way related to standards, but wait! We always use the opportunity to teach about writing describing poems and using your 5 senses. TA-DA!

I thought some folks might be interested in our little fall writing (and cooking!) activity. I'll descibe it in the blog, and I'll also include a lesson plan at the end that you can download for free!

Before chopping, we give each student an apple. Sometimes they are all the same, but this year some of them came from the store which means we had a huge array of different kinds of apples.

After they have their apples, we review our 5 senses and together, we make a graphic organizer. Mine looked like this:

We decided that we needed at least 5 spaces to record our 5 senses observations...this one had 6 but that worked out ok for later on. I told them the didn't have to do mine if they had a different idea, and one of my students made his graphic organizer look like this:

I like his better!

After we make the graphic organizer, we take a couple of minutes to use each of our senses to describe the apples.

Everyone records their observations on their graphic organizers. Then we collect the apples and wash them - VERY IMPORTANT GERM REDUCING STEP! :-)

Each apple gets peeled and then we let the kids use an apple corer to break them into pieces. I forgot to take pictures during this step...I was helping! The pieces go into the crock pot - minus any seeds or chunks of skin.

Then the students helped put the rest of the ingredients in the crockpot.

sugar

cinnamon

mix!

water

lemon juice

Then comes the hard part - W...A...I...T...I...N...G. The applesauce simmers in the crockpot all day long (on high!). The best part? Our classroom smells amazing!

In the afternoon, I use a potato masher and smoosh the cooked apples into applesauce and everyone gets a bowl. While we eat, we write poems about our apples. We use our 5 Senses graphic organizer and I give them a lot of freedom to write their poem however they would like.

 They put their poems on die-cut apples and I am using them on the bulletin board outside my door. :-)

This is one of our favorite activities in 4th grade! Students remember it for years to come. I love that every kid can be a part of it and that my mom can come do something so fun with them. Their poems always turn out pretty great!

In the document below, I included general directions for the activity, as well as a graphic organizer, and the recipe for Crockpot Applesauce! It's my very first FREEBIE! YAY! Click the link to take you to my TpT store where you can download it for FREE!

An Apple A Day Writing Activity

If this activity works for you or if you do it differently, I'd love to hear about it! Don't forget to link up your fun fall activity too!