Heat Changes Things

Core Learning Experience

+ Supplies and Equipment

Possible/Expected Discoveries

Extended Learning and Other Curriculum Areas

• Demonstrate by making applesauce.   Discuss the shape, color, texture, hardness etc.
• Teacher cuts the apples in quarters, find, count and save the seeds. Children use plastic serrated knives to cut the quarters in smaller pieces with a sawing motion. Place all the pieces in a pot. Give each child a piece to eat to experience the crunchiness

• Predict what might happen if we cook the apples. Should we add sugar? Cinnamon? Water? Why or why not? Cook some in a separate pot and taste the difference. Will the color change?
• Change the texture more by having the children mash it. Compare to whole apple, and precooked piece. Describe the changes, differences, and similarities. The heat of the stove changed the apples from crunchy and hard to soft and mushy. Do you think that anything else can do the same thing to apples? If a child suggests something, then try it. (Some suggestions might be: gets soft when we chew it; squishing it with something hard etc.)
• Can you think of some other things that might change if we heat them in a pot on the stove? (Potatoes, rocks, eggs)
• Can you think of some other ways to make things hot? Do they change in any ways if they get hot? How? (Fire, place in sunshine, child in warm bath, near warm light bulb)

•  Taste test different varieties of apples.  Graph your favorites.
• Weigh apples. Discuss fractions: whole, ¼, ½, 1/3.
• Compare apple sizes.  Arrange apples from smallest to largest.
• Create patterns with 3 colors of paper apples.
• Sequencing:  How an apple grows.  How to eat an apple.
• Glue apple seeds to a paper letter A.
• Paint small paper plates red, green or yellow. Add a stem. Create a wall tree display with brown grocery bags crumpled into trunk and branches.
• Make apples on a tree with thumbprints.