Wrap-Up: How to Make an Apple Pie

We spent a week studying the Five in a Row book selection How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World.  This is the most adorable book ever!  In it, the girl decides to make an apple pie, but her supermarket is closed.  So she travels the globe to gather the ingredients for her pie--wheat from Italy, a cow (for milk, for butter) from England, a chicken (for eggs) from France, sugar cane from Jamaica, and cinnamon from Sri Lanka.  Along the way, she dips a jar into the ocean so that she can evaporate the water for salt.  Finally she lands back in the USA on a Vermont apple orchard to get the apples, makes her pie, and invites her friends to come enjoy it with her.  The illustrations are hilarious, and totally make the book. 

Obviously, this book is well suited to some geography study.  We found all of the places that the girl went on our map, and drew lines between them to trace her travels.  I forgot to take a picture of the map, but it looked crazy!  What a fun trip that would have been. 

We watched some YouTube videos about how to milk a cow and about the different varieties of chickens, their eggs, etc.  

We spent a day taste testing different varieties of apples, and learning about the different parts of an apple.  We dissected one and counted its seeds, weighed it in the bucket balance, and used it as a stamp.  

The highlight of this row, of course, was making their own apple pie.  Because Mommy is useless in the kitchen, the kids made their apple pie on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with Daddy!  David had his work cut out for him, making a gluten and dairy free apple pie, his first pie EVER, with three eager little helpers.  We ate it for dessert on Thanksgiving, and it was really good!  I was impressed. 

Following our apple theme, we kept a "thankful tree" through the month of November.  I made a brown paint on butcher paper tree trunk and bought a pack of craft foam apples on a clearance end cap at Target.  Every day we wrote down something were were thankful for on one of the apples and taped it up.  The tree looked so fun at the end of the month.   I saved the tree trunk so we can do it again next year!

This was such a fun book.  Check it out of the library and read it with yours!