National Maths Week

 "Marvelous Maths Day": An apple thematic unit

 

Did you know that apples came in three colours? Most of us didn't realise that we had brought in yellow apples and not green!

We began our day by listening to an information text about apples. We learned about how apples grow, when they are harvestes, how they are stored and that they come in three colours.

Our favourite fun fact was that apples grow from the flowers of the apple blossom. Turn your apple upside down to see the remains of the flower. Cool or what?!!!!!!!

Graphing Activities

We began by graphing our apples to determine the most popular colour. As you can see from below, red apples are a clear favourite among the class.     

Next we studied our apples to see if they had a stem or not and created a graph based on this information. We predicted that we would have more apples without a stem, which turned out to be incorrect!

                                Graphing by colour                                                                 Graphing by presence of a stem

Sorting/Classification Activities

An apple set was created and then further refined by sorting apples by type: Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and Galia. We learned that different types of apples grow on different types of apple trees. We noted that the red set had more, just as the red line was the longest when we graphed the colours.

                                     Apple Set                                                              Colour/Type Sets

Weighing Activity

Next we looked at our partners apple and guessed who had the heaviest apple. To determine the correct answer we measured them both using a balance. We also had a competition to see who had the heaviest and lightest apple.