Ben and I just finished our study of Johnny Appleseed and yummy apples!  Well, we're almost finished.  We still have some apple taste-testing and apple pie-baking to do tomorrow!  But we finished our lapbook, so I thought I'd go ahead and post some pictures. 

Last week we were supposed to go on a "Johnny Appleseed" field trip to Huber's Orchard in Starlight, IN, with our local homeschool group.  But due to illness, we had to cancel.  So today Ben, Nana and I headed up there for our own field trip.  There was so much to do and Ben was having so much fun, that we never actually got around to picking apples!  But we did eat apple butter on our fried biscuits for lunch at the restaurant there.

Later when I have some more time, I will post a slideshow of the field trip today and maybe the apple pie baking tomorrow.  But for now, here are some pictures of our lapbook!  And for those of you who may be interested, most of the lapbooking components for this lapbook came from the FREE apple lapbook at www.liveandlearnpress.com.  The rest came from www.enchantedlearning.com.

The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed

One thing that we discussed quite a bit...Tall Tales.  There are many books about Johnny Appleseed and we read several of them.  We discovered there are many stories about him that are probably tall tales.   We listened to  Jim Weiss on CD tell several tall tales, including Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan.  This book took more of a simple, biographical approach, i.e. not so many tall tales.  The artwork in this book is absolutely beautiful too!

Here is the front of our lapbook with a color copy of our main book and a handwriting sample.

This is the lapbook opened up.  On the left, Ben colored pictures of apple trees through the seasons.  On the right are several "did you know" facts about apples.  In the center is our Johnny Appleseed fact sheet and a map of the states he traveled through. 

Here you can see the trees Ben colored of an apple tree for each season.

Here are the "did you know" minit books opened up to reveal the answers.  I had these facts plus 4 untrue statements printed out and Ben had to choose the ones that were indeed facts about apples.  He did great.  He didn't even fall for the "apples are not good for you" statement!  Now if I could just convince him of the benefits of broccoli!

Here is the Johnny Appleseed fact sheet opened up.  Johnny Appleseed was born on September 26, 1774 in Massachusetts.  His real name was John Chapman.  He traveled mostly along the Ohio River, visiting pioneer settlers and planting apple orchards for them.  One of the "tall tales" about him says that he was friend to all animals, even bears loved him.  And that he would sleep in the cold rather than build a fire into which a misquito might fly and die.

Here is the lapbook with the center extension opened up.  At the top is Ben's apple art project.  Underneath that you'll find a food pyramid and several minit books.  We touched on the food pyramid, mostly concentrating on where apples fell on it and how it is constructed with the healthier foods as the "foundation."

Here we see the minit books opened.  The minit book to the left is an "apple seed prediction" book.  Ben predicted how many seeds we would find in an apple (3) and then we cut open the apple to find out how many were really there (7).  On the right is our "apple fraction" book.  When cutting up our apple to count the seeds, we first cut it into 2 pieces to learn the fraction 1/2 and then into 4 to learn the fraction 1/4. The book on the bottom is of pictures of the apple life cycle.

Once we were finished using our apple for our math lessons, we moved on to art.  Ben used the apple to "stamp" paints in this beautiful pattern!  Did you notice that the 5 seed pods create a star when cut across the cross section?  Ben thought that was very cool!