This week we gave our taste buds a treat during our Apple Tasting Party.

  It all began with a story about a little girl whose mother sent on a quest to find a Little Red House with no windows and no doors and with a star in the middle. After a long search and with help from her animal friends, the little girl finally found it! Can you guess what it was? It was an apple (which you probably surmised by now). With no windows or doors an apple is a "house" for the seeds inside. But what about the star in the middle you may ask. Instead of cutting an apple the usual way (lengthwise down the middle from stem to blossom end) try cutting it corsswise through the middle. When you open the two pieces...voila! There will be a five point star made from the seed casings with the seeds laying inside.

   For our tasting Party we had 4 different types of apples (and colors, too). A RED delicious apple, a YELLOW delicious apple, a GREEN granny smith, and an ORANGE braeburn apple (ok, so it was red and yellow together, but when you mix those 2 colors together you get orange -  we fudged just a little on that one...) Before tasting the apples we cut crosswise through the middle of each apple and were delighted to discover that each one did, indeed, have a star in the middle (to which we exclaimed YAY!).  We carefully removed the seeds from their casing and counted how many there were.  We glued each seed from the individual apple and placed them on a special tally chart.  Once this was accomplished we got to our favorite part - tasting a piece of the apple.  We discovered that each apple had a different taste, some we liked better than others.  We had to tuck away the taste of each apple in our "brain pockets" (AKA memory) because at the very end of our Tasting Party we each were going to vote on the apple we liked the tast of best.  When all the seeds had been counted, we discussed which apple had the most seeds (one apple had 16 seeds, which must be some kind of Apple Tasting Party record), which had the least, which had fewer seeds, more seeds or the same amount of seeds. Finally it was time to vote, and overall, most of us voted for the RED apple - although some of the other apples cam in a close second.  It was interesting talking about why we preferred one taste over another.  This is definitely something you CAN try at home!  If you would like to view the results of our activity we have the graphs posted outside our classroom door.

Debbie and Michelle