Intown Jewish Preschool: The Apples of ours Eyes

Go back in time two weeks.... Walk into our classroom and all around you can feel the Holiday spirit. We discussed the custom of eating apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashana; this is done symbolically, so that we should all be blessed with a sweet new year! Children learn best from doing, so we got right into the action: Each child got an apple wedge and little cup of honey. It was a sight to be seen... some children licked the honey all the way to the bottom of their cup, while others asked us for another piece of apple. It was evident to each of us Morahs just how much the children appreciate this custom, and how sweet it is to have concrete acts to bring out lofty Judaic concepts .

A natural outgrowth of the joy in eating sweet apples and honey, is making apples a part of our method of inquiry in Kitah Gimmel. At our group gathering I brought a basket of apples. Together we named the three colors of apples we brought in, we also named the apple names, Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Golden Delicious. Oh, and of course pointed out that A is for apple (a very holistic way in which we will cover all of the alpha bet slowly but surely throughout the year). We continued to explore the apples and which features the various apples have in common. One of our friends pointed out that all 3 apples were round. "Just like pizza and snow balls", "the world is also round", "wheels on my mom's car" were just some of the ideas of round things the children thought of. The children waited patiently while I went around and gave each child a piece of Red, Yellow and green apples to taste. Then, everyone had a chance to tell the class which color apple was their favorite. I graphed this, and together we counted how many of us like each color. Green won by one point, with red and yellow coming in at a tie, 5 each!

We have been thinking of a way to take the apple conversation one step further. On Thursday, at our group gathering I brought a scale, some more apples, and small teddy bears. You can see the children's suspense as we counted how many big teddy bears, and how many small teddy bears weighed as much the apples. We also weighed two apples at a time to see which apple was the heavier one. The children all wanted to to have a turn to weigh items on the scale, so during play time the weighing continued. The scale sat in the middle of the room and our friends had turns playing with the wooden scale, and seeing which items in our classroom weigh more and which weigh less.