We had another beautiful day of apple picking. It was quite chilly when we woke up (in the 40s), so we layered in warm sweatshirts. As we waited for the right time to leave to meet our friends (JediBoy was very impatient this morning!) we cuddled on the playroom couch and read. We traded books again. This time, JediBoy read “The Nut” (a phonics reader he hadn’t seen before), “Dinah Likes To Eat” and “The Big Fish” (both Brand New Readers he’d read before) and the All Aboard Reader “Johnny Appleseed.” I was most impressed with his reading of Johnny Appleseed, as he is already starting to lose the stilted tone of a new reader soun-ding–out–the–w-or-ds. He was using some great inflection and adding his own accents to the story. I only had to help him with a handful of words. He read some pages completely on his own, including:
Johnny was going West, too. He wanted to plant apple trees. He wanted to make the West a nicer place to live. So Johnny got a big, big bag. He filled it with apple seeds. Then he set out.
It’s just so exciting to see how this burst of interest and understanding has come in the past few weeks. I love being here for every step of his journey.
I read to him three of our typical apple-picking-day books - Picking Apples and Pumpkins, The Apple Pie Tree, and the Troll Reader of Johnny Appleseed. I also read him a new book: Mr. Putter and Tabby Pick the Pears. We were both hysterical laughing at Mr. Putter ZINGING the apples over his house with his slingshot.
Soon enough, it was time to go. By the time we arrived, the sun had burned off the last of the fog and it was very nice out. The orchard had Macintosh, Cortland and Gala ready today, so we picked a bucket of Gala, one of my favorite snacking apples.
Then the kids played by the animals (goats, sheep, donkeys and two new pigs) and we attempted an overgrown corn maze, eventually breaking our way out between the stalks!
We stayed and had a nice lunch in the store - they make a delicious grilled apple, ham and cheese sandwich that I love, and JediBoy was THRILLED that he was able to look at a new menu and read enough to know they had hot dogs and ham and cheese, and he picked a hot dog. It was the first time he’d read the words on the menu to order, instead of asking me or using pictures.
When we got home, it was so nice I knew we needed an outdoor project. So we made an apple print tote bag, just the right size for JediBoy to pick apples into next time. I’d picked up a medium tote bag and a bottle of red fabric paint at the craft store for only a few dollars and had them waiting for the perfect opportunity.
Making a tote like this is a simple project. I just cut the apple in half and then had JediBoy paint it with the fabric paint. It does help a little to dry the apple with a paper towel after you cut it, and to “load up” the apple with paint by dabbing the paint on instead of brushing it.
Then JediBoy would press it down onto the fabric of the tote bag. Sometimes he did the printing completely independently and other times I helped him rock the apple from side to side so the print would be more complete.
He did 8 prints on each side of the tote bag, and he was very pleased with his finished project!
JediBoy also planted a handful of the seeds from this apple - a few in various spots outside, and one in a cup to keep inside. We read a short section from one of our reference books about seeds and plants, and then we put on our Tall Tales: Johnny Appleseed dvd (with Martin Short as Johnny Appleseed and Molly Ringwald as Jenny).
After the video, JediBoy wanted to do more painting. I helped him by painting his arm and hand brown! He pressed it onto a big piece of paper to make the trunk and branches of a tree - an apple tree, of course. He added to that painting with his paintbrushes and then made two more paintings. When it was time to clean up for the evening’s outing, he was sad that he had to stop painting.
**edited Wednesday morning to add in pictures… still getting the Missing Argument errors…**
