Johnny Appleseed Fun - Craft, Fingerprint Apples, & More!

This Johnny Appleseed unit is packed with ways to celebrate this amazing man while keeping your students engaged! Your kids will love the apple volcano, easy crafts, math activities, and more that are perfect for preschool, kindergarten, and first grade students.

We started our unit on Johnny Appleseed today. I’m thrilled that all of the activities included in my TPT store will be more than enough to keep us busy for this entire week in both reading and math. (A little science experiment is thrown in there too!) You can grab your copy by clicking on the cover below.

I started by asking my students what they knew about Johnny Appleseed. They were really trying but all they could come up with were sentences like, “He liked apples.” or “He picked the seeds out of apples.”

I told them that by the time I read them the nonfiction book included they would know so much more about this important man.

Update: If you are interested in the costume I used.. It was the quickest costume ever! I “muddied” my face with some brown eyeshadow, rubbed it all over one of my husband’s shirt, tore holes in it, ripped it up some, and threw a pot on my head! The bag was made from some leftover burlap I had and I painted the word “Seeds” on it. I LOVE going barefoot so I took my shoes off for some of the pictures! 🙂

We read through the book that is included in the resource and paused to discuss each page. The illustrations in the resource are clip art images from Corinne with Chirp Graphics. She is so talented! They are absolutely precious.

The students could now tell me so much more about Johnny Appleseed. They were especially intrigued by the idea that Johnny Appleseed was a vegetarian and so is Mrs. Statum! 🙂

After we finished the book, I had them go to their seat and instructed them to draw a picture with lots of detail in the space provided. Meanwhile, my assistant and I made our way around the room asking students the questions on one of the differentiated writing pages included and writing down their answers.

I had them use a skinny marker to trace the words that we wrote. (Remember- this is only our 2nd month of kindergarten.) There are some easier and more difficult writing pages included but I just wanted to use this fill-in-the-blank one.

There is an adorable craft included and we finished the first part today. Tomorrow we will add aluminum foil pots to the heads. I’ll share a post tomorrow after school so you can see how much cuter they are. For now, this is how Johnny Appleseed looks.

We glued them to long construction paper. I laid out fall colors as I thought that would make a pretty display in our hallway.

I think they already look adorable and can’t wait to see them when the pot on their heads is transformed into an even more eye-catching one with aluminum foil.

Later I divided the kids up into 2 groups. One group worked on these fingerprint apples and the other worked on the headbands (This was mainly because I only had a few sets of ink for the stamps.) As they finished they moved on to the other activity.

We will wear our “pots” to lunch tomorrow in honor of Johnny Appleseed’s birthday. I printed the pot on regular paper but later wished I would have used cardstock so that the handle stood a little bit straighter. Oh well, you live and you learn!

I set morning work out for tomorrow on each child’s table. I went ahead and created a sample for some of my lower students to reference as needed.

This unit has so many fun activities for you to practice number order and number recognition. It’s so much fun that your kids won’t even realize how much they are learning!

~~I will post again tomorrow with an update of what else we were able to finish~~. (You can now click the link at the bottom to see the next post! So much to do this week with this resource… easy crockpot applesauce, apple picking games, erupting volcano apple, apple pie play dough, & more! It’s going to be a fun week for me and my students. I know they are going to love those play dough mats. They turned out really cute.

Click on any of the covers below to grab your copy of the resource. Activities for the entire week for just a few dollars??? Yes, please!