Math with Apples Project

This week we read 'An Apple pie for Dinner' and practiced our measuring skills with an apple Math investigation.

This book is very cute! Granny Smith (pun intended) wants to bake an apple pie but  she doesnt have any apples. All she has is a basket of plums and sets off in the hope that she can trade them. The illustrations are very fairy tale like and reminded me of the amazing shadow applique my grandma used to create.

Apple Math:

Earlier in the day we had compared raisins and grapes and talked about how drying removes the water.
The goal for apple investigation was to find out how much weight an apple looses when it is dried. Mini Piwi was chief fruit weigh-person, Miss K was the data recorder and self proclaimed 'calculator  of the important stuff'.

Here's the method I wrote for the Piwis to follow

1. Have a grown-up peel, core and slice 2 apples into thin pieces.

2. Line a baking pan with baking paper and ask Mama to turn the oven on to 200 degrees

3. Weigh the slices from each apple and record the measurement for each one

 4. Lay the apple slices on the pan

5.  Ask a grownup to put the pan into the oven

6. Wait patiently :-) for about 1 hour until the apple slices are dry.

7. Ask a grown up to remove the pan from the oven at let tthe apples cool

8. Weigh all the dried apples to find their new total mass.

 9. Eat the apples!

There are so many things you could have kids calculate from this activity. We kept it fairly simple and I asked Miss K to find:

1. The total mass of the apples before they went into the oven
2. How much mass the apples had lost from the drying

Another calculation that occured to me (after we were done) was the mass of the core and/or peel we had removed.

 The Piwi's really enjoyed their snack and even Miss K declared that this kind of math was actually fun.