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This month during our Orchard Harvest unit from our Experience Early Learning Curriculum we have been learning about trees and their life cycle, the different fruit that grows on trees, skins and shells, and animals that we would see in an orchard.
During our week of learning about skins and shells I set up a STEAM station as one of our centers. I sat out a banana peel, peeled a lemon, lime, apple and a pear. I sat out magnifying glasses, a list of the fruit on the tray, hung up a question to think about and answer and pictures of the different fruit.
They worked on identifying the fruits, using their sense of smell to help them with identification. They looked at the textures up close and compared which ones felt similar. For a challenge I asked them to lay the fruit skin next to the word identifying which fruit it came from.
These young scientists were hard at work with this fun STEAM station! Fruit Skins was a great sensory activity that combined physical science and communication. They even got to taste some of the tasty fruit that these skins came from.
In your Experience Preschool curriculum books you can find STEAM station ideas that correlate with the daily topics. They have pictures and questions you can print off under member resources, and it's easy to implement your own materials into these ideas as well. For instance I made a list of the fruit names I used to challenge them, as well as have pictures of the different fruit available for them to look at. I made my own picture since I used certain fruits in this station.
We are wrapping up Orchard Harvest this week, which is hard to believe! In November our classroom will transform into all things "On the Go."
