Making applesauce

On Friday my class made homemade applesauce in class. I found the idea on another blog and thought what a great idea to talk about following instructions and making sure our writing is in the correct sequence. We got to practice a variety of skills in such a fun and engaging activity. The students loved to help cook the applesauce and we worked on writing, reading, and math skills in the process. 

My students walked in to see the anchor chart and crock pot. Immediately they were curious. We started the morning going around sharing what ingredients we thought we were going to need and how we thought we would make applesauce.
We also had a brief mini lesson on different types of text. I brought out a cookbook and asked them if they knew what it was. 

We discussed how chefs need to follow a recipe when they cook something.
Ingredients:
10 large cooking apples: peeled, sliced and diced (I was lucky and had Ben on the job of prepping the apples last night.)
2 cup of water
1 cup of white sugar
As a class we then read the recipe and measured out and added the ingredients to the crockpot. 

Once we added everything we left it to rest.Throughout the day I let my students stir the ingredients (supervised and from my observation not many students know how to use a wooden spoon to mix) we used adjectives to describe the way the room smelled when we came back in after lunch, the way the applesauce looked, and we talked about what was happening in the crockpot. I used an interval timer so they knew when it was their turn to stir it.

We also wrote a sequence of events of our applesauce. I let my kids lead the conversation and then they wrote it themselves.

Then around 2.30pm we enjoyed tasting our apple sauce. It would have been delicious with ice-cream but I didn't think that far ahead - some children still had three servings!

You can follow this link to a copy of my applesauce document I just printed one for each child and displayed it on their writing wall.