How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World
Over the last two weeks we’ve been rowing How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman. Ian loved the story and all the activities we did from the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1). In addition to reading it several times, we watched a cute reading of the story on YouTube as well as a Reading Rainbow episode featuring the book. (Our library has most of the series on DVD.) I focused mostly on geography and the sources of the various ingredients, but we also had fun doing math with a bowl of apples on the kitchen table and a few other suggestions.
We talked about the seven continents as we put together a puzzle map of the world. (I also found some free coloring pages about the continents at CurrClick.) Then we used the story disks from the printables at Homeschool Share to locate the various places in the book.
I printed and laminated a set of cards for matching various elements of the girl’s trip around the world. Elijah practiced sorting them into three piles based on the pictures (country, food and modes transportation), while Ian matched up the proper cards into a pile for each location.
Of course, the highlight of our time with this book was making an apple pie. We tried to get the freshest ingredients possible.
We spent a day at an apple farm and picked our apples right off the tree.
We made our own butter by shaking whipping cream (and a pinch of salt) in baby food jars.
We even evaporated our own salt. We had planned to get an egg from our friends’ chicken, but that didn’t work out. Either did grinding our own cinnamon, though Ian was impressed with the bark.
After begging all week to make our pie, Ian was a great helper when we finally had collected all our ingredients.
And voila! Our beautiful (and delicious) apple pie!
We decided it looked too good to settle for eating it plain, so we also made some homemade vanilla ice cream by rolling it around in a pair of coffee cans. Heavenly!
To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.” Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.