How to make an apple pie and see the world

Last week turned out to have a geographical tinge. Not only did we "row" How to make an apple pie and see the world by Marjorie Priceman but we also found out about our cultural exchange partners.

How to make an apple pie is a funny story about someone who wanted to make an apple pie and found the market was closed. Instead of buying the ingredients in the market she had to travel the world to find what she needed. We've had this book for sometime and it hasn't lost its appeal although I did find that the idea of actually making apple pie seemed much less attractive to the children than before. Maybe they've done this too often?

Anyway, we did lots of geography. The book has a map which we used to follow the story. We also placed ingredients on the countries mentioned on a big plastic map.

In the book, the salt water is put out to evaporate. We did try this but it has been very cold and I thought that this was more likely to show that salt water and plain water have different freezing points so I boiled up some salt water which showed well that the water evaporates leaving a salty residue.

The matter of keeping the milk and egg fresh comes up. We have put bread, in a bag, in the fridge and ,in another bag, on the kitchen window sill (amazing what ends up on home educator's kitchen window sills-worth a post on its own!). We wait to see the results!

This book lends itself to being acted out. I was a bit distracted at the way eggs were being carried around but the children enjoyed this.

We used apples for printing.

The results weren't fantastic. Perhaps someone has some tips. Mr Exuberance rapidly changed course in favour of hand printing. These prints came out much better although Mummy chickened out of allowing foot painting, definitely an outdoor activity, in my opinion.

Using hands for painting goes down well here. Miss Belle made this apple tree using the side of her hand for the trunk, her hands for the leaves and fingers for the apples.

I thought that playdough apples would be fun. It is always interesting to see how the children often prefer to do something different and their results. Miss Belle became very enthusiastic about making playdough planets and people.

.

This week, on to Scotland.