Using seasonal favorites is something I do a lot of in homeschooling. Each year we do something with apples, then pumpkins, then turkeys, then snowflakes and so on. It creates a rhythm of the year that the kids can rely on. I love teaching my kids with food related themes, so right now, it’s all about learning with APPLES!
We have so many different kinds of apples that are grown in Washington that it’s hard to know which ones to pick! I ended up picking the 6 most popular. Together with a few other homeschoolers, we set about making a chart to choose our favorite.
First I cut the apples into bite sized pieces and put the sticker on the bowl so we would know which was which. Then I had the kids taste one at a time and my daughter, Cyan, marked if they liked it on the tally graph.
They each got one mark if they liked it, two marks if they loved it. After we had tasted them all, I had the kids pick their very very favorite… and that one got a third tally mark.
In the end, we had a rough graph of what everyone like most. The Jazz apple came out way ahead!
I enjoy using tally marks for things like this because their configuration of groupings of 5 marks is easy to count, even for the 1st graders among us. It is a good visual that lends itself well to conversations about other types of graphs, like pie charts or bar graphs. I had my kids make their tally marks into a bar graph and a pie chart. Logan (1st grade) created a bar graph after watching this video and Cyan (7th grade) made a pie chart, in which she had to reduce fractions so that she could create the pie wedges.
All in all, a great object lesson that started out with apples! Now to make mini apple pies with all the apple leftovers!
YUM!
