Friday Greetings! Storytime and Apple Activities!

Fall is in full swing here in Michigan and we have beautiful leaves of all colors on the trees. The air is getting colder and I have to wear a jacket, and even gloves when I leave for work in the morning! At this time of year there is a lot of apple baking going on! My favorite is apple crisp, but people also love to make apple sauce, apple pie, apple cider and other great apple foods! Here is a quick and fun mini apple crisp recipe that kids can make all by themselves!

Simple Apple Crisp Recipe

Ingredients:
one apple
2 tbsp butter softened
2 tbsp brown sugar
1/4 cup oatmeal
a sprinkle of cinnamon
- add in chopped nuts if you like!

step 1: Prepare a pan by putting a cupcake liner into a cupcake tin, or use another kid sized baking dish.
step 2: Prepare the apple: Peel and cut into small sections one large apple. I have even had 5 year old children peel their own apple with a plastic knife. It takes them some time and they often lose some good apple in the process, but it is great for practicing their fine motor skills! If your child is young, help them with the cutting part.
step 3: Crumble mixture: Mix the butter, sugar, oatmeal and cinnamon together in a bowl. Adjust amounts so that you have a moist and crumbly mixture. Kids love to do the mixing part with their hands!
step 4: Put the apples into the baking dish and top with the crumble mixture. Press the crumble down to make it smooth.
step 5: Bake at 350 for about 35 minutes.
step 6: cool and enjoy! It's delicious topped with ice cream, or non dairy alternative!

If you try apple crisp this week, let me know at next week's storytime how you liked it! It is one of my favorites. If you want to make it fancy you can add more spices. I like nutmeg and lemon zest on my apples. What do you like? Creating in the kitchen is so much fun! You can share your pictures of your apple crisp on griggs facebook page, or email them to me so that I can see your creation.
If you are interested in more apple activities for this week, check out the attachment to this email. There is an idea for an apple experiment, recipes for apple sauce and apple chips, even apple play dough!
Have a great weekend!
Mrs. C

PS...  Here are some more great apple activities for you to try!

As we enter the fall season, we at Griggs thought it might be fun for parents and students to do some apple-related activities! We’ve made a short list of some of our favorites with material lists and instructions. We hope to see pictures of the students having a wonderful time this fall! If there is a U-Pick farm nearby, we encourage you to take your students to pick apples! When you get home, you can slice an apple in half and place the flat side of the slice in either paint or ink and stamp the apple on a piece of paper for decorations, or to show our student the different parts of the apple!

Rotting apple experiment

·       Empty glass ( for air)

·       Water glass

·       Vinegar glass

·       Oil glass

·       Apple slices

Set an apple slice in each glass and watch how each slice reacts to the solution over time. Have your student write a hypothesis of what they think will happen. Will one solution make the apple decay faster? Slower?

Make applesauce

·       8 apples, peeled and cut into chunks.

·       ½ cup of water

·       Measuring cups and spoons 9for water, sugar, and cinnamon)

·       ½ cup of sugar

·       Cinnamon

·       Stove or slow cooker

·       Two bowls

·       Wooden spoon and/or potato masher

1. Put half of the apples into one bowl. Put the other half into a stove pot or the slow cooker, depending on how you will heat the apples.
2. Add the same amount of water to each container of apples.
3. Leave the bowl of apples alone. Heat the other container of apples until the apples are soft. This should take about 10-12 minutes on a burner set to medium or 2 1/2 hours in a slow cooker set on high.
4. When the heated apples are soft, remove them from the heat and put them into the second bowl.
5. Have children stir and mash each bowl of apples. (Be careful with the hot bowl.) How are the heated apples different from the unheated apples? What happened to them? Describe the changes.
6. Once the applesauce has cooled enough, add sugar and cinnamon to taste. Enjoy the applesauce. If the unheated apples haven’t browned, you can drain the water from them and eat them, too. How do they contrast with the heated apples? You’ll probably use words like crispy, crunchy, and mushy.

Talk about it:

·       Why do we have you make a bowl of unheated apple chunks? We do this so that the investigation is a true experiment, with a test (heated apples) and a comparison (unheated apples). Because we treat the two bowls of apples exactly the same except for the heating step, we know that it's the heat-and not some other difference-that caused the change in the soft apples.

·       Ask your child to think about other examples of irreversible change—things that can't go back to the way they were. If your unheated apples turned brown, that's one example! The Perfect Pancake episode includes descriptions of lots of these, and there are plenty more all around us.

Apple scented playdough (no cook)

 2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup salt

2 tbsp. cream of tartar

3 tbsp. cooking oil (or coconut oil)

3 tbsp. apple pie spice

Food coloring

Mix all together and slowly add 1 ½ cup almost boiling water to mixture. Stir and a ball should form. Allow 5 minute to cool before playing

Apple Chips:

Prep time:  20 mins

Cook time:  2 hours

Total time:  2 hours 20 mins

Serves: 2 cups

Homemade Oven Baked Apple Chips: It's amazing how different an apple tastes once the moisture is removed. Naturally sweet, healthy and totally addictive.

Ingredients

·       2 apples

·       1 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions

1.     Position oven racks in the upper and lower third of oven.

2.     Preheat oven to 225 ℉.

3.     Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Set aside.

4.     Wash and dry the apples.

5.     Core apples. (Optional)

6.     Slice apples as thin as possible (about ⅛ inch) with a very sharp knife or a mandolin (leave skin on).

7.     Place apples on the baking sheet in a single layer and not touching each other.

8.     Sprinkle cinnamon evenly over apple slices.

9.     Bake for approximately 1 hour and then turn each slice over, and continue to bake for at least another hour so. The longer they stay, they crispier they get.

10.  Best served the day they are made. Can be stored in an airtight container for a few days.

Notes

The baking time will vary based on the thickness of each slice and the moisture content of the variety of the apples.
Once the apple chips have been baked, they will crisp up as they cool off.