One of my favorite kindergarten activities is instruction writing, because kindergarten students have some pretty wacky instructions for simple tasks.
I'm adding this activity to my fall unit on apples this year and am super excited to share it with you!
{How to Make Apple Pie} is an instruction writing activity for any elementary grade. Use it as an introduction to writing instructions during a fall writing unit. At the kindergarten level, have volunteers or buddies from an older classroom transcribe the silly instructions kindergarten students give. I usually equip my volunteers with a list of prompts to help the younger students complete the task.
The prompts include:
- How many apples do you need? Where do you get them?
- What do you do to the apples?
- What do you use to make the crust?
- Where do you cook it?
- At what temperature is it cooked? For how long?
- How do you serve the pie?
- Do you share it with anyone?
As mentioned before, I've never done this will apple pie before. I have, in the past, asked students to write instructions for how to cook the Thanksgiving turkey. One student said that you have to catch the turkey in the wild with a net, then cook it for 10 minutes at 30 degrees.
Their answers are absolutely priceless!
Once all the students have finished the activity, I like to staple them together to make a class book so that students can share their illustrations and instructions with others. I have also make copies of all of the pages and sent them home as books to share with their families.
You can download your own copy of {How to Make Apple Pie}
here and {How to Cook a Turkey}
here.
Let me know how these worked in your classroom! What were the silliest instructions?
