Today we made apple sauce! Why? Because I love cooking with my crock pot and my awesome partner, Mrs. Stagg, came up with this amazing idea to create a metaphor between making apple sauce and creating our class culture!
We started with 10 apples. The kiddos were challenged to find 2 apples that were identical. We determined that many of the apples were similar, but none of them were identical. We compared this to our class...we are similar but we have differences like skin color, hair length (stems on the apples), and size.
After cutting the apples into chunks, they got placed into the crock pot and we added some special ingredients (water, sugar, and cinnamon). We talked about how we have all be placed together in our classroom, much like the apples in the crock, and how we can add some specialness to our class like respect, responsibility, self-control, courage, and perseverance.
After hours of cooking, we were able to enjoy our sweet and cinnamony Apple sauce as an afternoon snack. We talked about how the flavors of the different apples blended together with the other ingredients to create something wonderful...just like we can create something wonderful in our classroom with all of us!