Apple Slices Hands-On Math Activity
- Oct 5, 2015
- 2 min read
The Fall weather is finally setting in across parts of the country, bringing cooler weather, changing colors, and the annual Fall harvest. Apple picking is a great community outing for kids with visual impairments. They can tramp along out in the orchard, feeling the tree trunk from the ground all the way up and out on a limb to find their very own treat – an apple to eat! So what do you do with all those apples once you've picked them? Try using them as a perfect hands-on tool for learning fractions!
Materials:
Apples of similar sizes
Knife or Apple Slicer Kitchen Tool
Prep Instructions:
Using the kitchen tool or knife, cut the apple into even slices depending on which fractions you want to teach. If you have several apples, keep one whole, slice one into halves, slice another into quarters, and so on.
Teaching Instructions:
Start with the whole apple, encouraging the child to feel all the way around it with both hands while examining the rounded shape and seamless skin around the wide part of the apple, or ‘circumference’ depending on what terminology you want to use. Next, give the two halves of an apple to the child and show how one side is flat but they fit together on that side to become “whole” again. Do the same for the quarter sections and so on, while comparing the different size slices to one another as well as the whole uncut apple. Feel how pieces from the same apple are the same size, but as the pieces get smaller, the more it takes to make up a whole apple!
Of course, you don’t want to waste all those good apples! Rinse some off for a snack, and save the rest in an airtight container in the fridge or bundle with a rubberband using this cool trick we found on Pinterest!
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