It’s Fall! Now for those of you in my beloved New England that means apple picking. For those of us in the deep south that means buying some apples at the store.

I decided to break out the apples and the paint to get us into the swing of Fall and Row loved it.

This was an activity I did every year in Kindergarten. I’ll share all the ways you can squeeze learning into this fun craft.

Simply gather an apple and split in half. I like to put Popsicle sticks through the centers so that they are more easily held for printing.

Place paint on your plates and dip. I also love to use a large restaurant sized cookie sheet for painting because it holds the paper in place as well as the mess.

It’s fun to press each apple onto the paper and lift to make a print and for toddlers it’s also fun to paint.

This simple activity lasted about 30 minutes-not to shabby for a 2 year old.

Now let’s bring the teacher out and talk about all the amazing teacher points you can hit on during this craft. We spoke about the colors of paint and I asked Row to dip in specific colors as we painted=color recognition. We talked about the way the apple felt=attributes-small, large, color and weight. We talked about the mass=weight, heavy and light.

How can you enrich this activity for school aged children? Add more colors and talk about primary and secondary colors as they print/paint. Talk about plants and discuss the parts of an apple, the skin, flesh, seeds. Discuss the plant life cycle. Oh and have fun!