This week we have been learning all about apples! We have read lots of apples books, we learned two new apple songs [5 Little Apples Hanging in a Tree & A-P-P-L-E (to the tune of BINGO)], and we turned our house area into an apple orchard!

Here is a picture of our apple stand where we can buy apples!

Here’s one of our apple trees where we can pick apples!

We also had lots of fun on Thursday playing with Apple Pie Soap Foam. We made the soap foam using a few drops of Dawn dish detergent, a 1/2 cup of water, and some apple pie spice. We mixed them all together in a mixer and it made the soap into a foam similar to shaving cream.  Our room smelled wonderful! 🙂 We had lots of fun playing with it with cups, spoons, and pie plates! Students were making apple cider, apple pie, apple sauce, and lot of big bubbles!

This week we turned the house area in a football stadium! Since we live in Nebraska we specifically made it into Memorial Stadium so we can pretend to be Husker Cheerleaders, football players, and coaches. 🙂 We’ve gotten to hear lots of “GO BIG RED!!” chants throughout our worktime!

On our bulletin board we have posted football vocabulary words; pictures of cheerleaders, football players, and the stadium; a posted football schedule; and the posted menu items and prices for our concession stand.  We changed all the food items in our play fridge to be the items listed on the concession stand menu.

Here’s the pictures of our football and cheer-leading “lockers”.

Here is our concession stand where students can buy pop, pizza, Runzas, hotdogs, and popcorn. The students have had lots of fun opening or closing the concession stand, buying food, and working as the concession stand employees.

This is my favorite part of our concession stand this year! I found the popcorn containers at Dollar Tree and have had the yellow sponge circles for years just sitting in my cupboard! They make a perfect pretend popcorn with lots of extra butter! 🙂

This week at school we read many versions of the book Jack & The Beanstalk. I choose to read this fairy tale this week because at outside time the students have been pretending that one of our ladders on the playground is a beanstalk. The students have been taking turns being “Jack” or the giant. If you are Jack you go up the beanstalk ladder and then whomever is the giant chases “Jack” all around the playground.

Here are some of the versions of the story we read this week:

Jack & The Bean Stalk by Richard Walker

Kate and the Beanstalk by Mary Pope Osborne

Waynetta and the Cornstalk: A Texas Fairy Tale

Paco and the Giant Chile Plant

As we read each version we talked about how they were similar and how they were different. Each story had a giant plant, a giant who lived at the top of the plant, and some sort of magic seed.

On Friday we also planted our own “magic beans” in wet cotton ball “clouds”. We hung them in our window and will see what happens to them when we come back to school on Monday!