How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World

We are doing a Five in a Row (preschool) lesson based on the book How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World.  It is about a girl who has to procure the ingredients for a pie the hard way because the market is closed.  She goes to Jamaica for sugar cane, Sri Lanka for cinnamon, Vermont for apples, etc.

After we read the book (which we own and have read many times before) Peter did a 1-20 dot-to-dot that made an airplane - just right for traveling the world.  His dot-to-dot skills leave a lot of room for improvement, but he is getting better at recognizing the teen numbers.

Next we talked about measuring ingredients to make a pie and Peter sorted measuring cups and spoons biggest to smallest.

For the grand finale, we got out "ocean water" and food coloring.  In the book the girl scoops up a jar of ocean water and evaporates it to get the salt she needs.  Peter tasted the ocean water that I had made the night before and agreed that it tasted salty even though he could not see any salt.  We added food coloring, because that made things more interesting, and then set out our water to evaporate in the sun.

The evaporation took longer than I thought it would in the hot, dry weather we are currently experiencing.  I expected that we would see salt by afternoon, but even that evening there were only a few crystals forming.  We left them out over the night, and this morning two tubs are almost dry, two tubs are a mix of crystals and water, and one tub is still all water.

I tried to get Peter to taste a salt crystal, but he wanted no part of it.  Instead I let Elliot taste it and he LOVED it.  After letting him lick the neon colored saltiness off my finger many times I finally had to hide the tub before his blood pressure started to spike.