Apple activities for children

Making an Apple doll

Our great-great-great-great grandparents did not have toyshops to buy things for their children to play with. So people used to make their own toys at home. If you had lived a few hundred years ago you might have received an Apple doll as a present instead of a Barbie doll! Or if your parents were too busy, you might have made one yourself. Of course there is nothing to stop you from making an Apple doll in the 21^st century!
You will find that Apple dolls have rather shrivelled-faces, a bit like an old woman. If you have a modern doll as well, you can make the Apple doll and the modern doll talk with each other. Pretend that the Apple doll is an ancient being and let your dolls teach each other things. The Apple doll can tell the modern doll how things used to be. The modern doll can explain to the Apple doll how we live now.
Here is how to make a traditional Apple doll: peel an apple and cut away the lower sides to form a chin. Carve a nose and a mouth and scoop out eyes. Carefully scoop out the core of the apple. This will take a little bit of patience, because you don’t want to break the apple. When you are done sprinkle salt inside to help dry the apple and preserve it. Stuff the hole you made with cotton wool or a bit of old rag. Insert a stick into the bottom of the apple. You can fasten a bit of cloth to this later to serve as a dress. The stick will also be useful so you can use the doll as a hand puppet.
Use beads or beans for the eyes. Sprinkle the apple with lemon juice and salt and let the apple-head dry for at least two weeks. When dry, add wool or string for hair.

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Carving Apple stamps

If there is an old apple going spare, you can use it to make stamps to decorate writing paper, birthday cards and anything else you like. You can make as many as 8 different stamps from one apple if you cut the fruit  in quarters and then cut each quarter in half. Ask your mum or dad to help you choose the right knife for carving, for example a potato-peeling knife. Carve simple shapes to start with, such as squares, circles, triangles, lines and such. When you get the hang of it, you can attempt more adventurous patterns such as a wavy line or the first letter of your name.
To use the stamp you put a few different colour poster paints on a saucer. Dip your stamp in the paint and press it on the paper. You can try out making interesting border patterns by using different shapes in a row. Have fun experimenting!

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Making an Apple puzzle

You can make an interesting apple puzzle from an old bit of cardboard, for example from a box, which you don’t need any more.

Begin by drawing the outline of the apple on the cardboard and then draw the lines of the puzzle pieces. You can imagine each of the pieces as a bite you take out of the apple. You can write words with coloured pens on each bite/puzzle piece to remind yourself why apples are such a good food and healthier than sweets or biscuits. Examples are:
Does not make me fat, Lovely taste, Juicy bite, Healthy stuff, Lots of vitamins, Natural sugars, No artificial colours, Cancer fighter, No salt, No packaging (has its own skin), Handy to pop in my pocket, Natural sugars, Cleans my teeth, Can plant the pip, Easy to take anywhere, Fibre, Let’s take another bite, An apple a day keepsthe doctor away, Yummy-yummy, good for my tummy.
When you finished you work you can carefully cut all the pieces with scissors. If the cardboard is very thick ask your parents if you can use a Stanley knife, but don’t forget to put another bit of cardboard underneath, so you don’t scratch the table with your knife. If you like making apple puzzles, you could make one from some bought coloured cardboard and write on it with gold or silver pens to make it look really attractive. If you can make a little box to put the puzzle in, it would make a lovely present for any small children you know! You can either make a flat box for the completed puzzle or you can make a dinky cube-shaped box with the puzzle pieces in the bottom and room for a real apple to eat on top! Decorate the box by painting or drawing apple trees on it and your present is ready!

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Growing Apple Pips

If you grow ALL the seeds of ALL the apples you’d ever eat in all your life into big apple trees, you’d probably be able to make the biggest orchard in the whole wide world! The difficulty is of course that you wouldn’t have the space to do it or the time to look after all these trees
Also, you can never be quite sure in advance what sort of apples you are going to get on the tree, that grows from a pip. This is because the seed is very much like the baby of two different parents. Bees or other insects have brought some tiny bits, called pollen, from the flowers of one tree to the little eggs deep within the flowers of another tree. The pollen and the little eggs together form the seed, which will grow in an apple. If the pollen comes from a tree with green sour apples and the little eggs from a tree with sweet red apples, there is no telling what a mixture of them will look like or taste like.

So growing apples from seed is a bit of an adventure! Even if you have no space in your garden or on your balcony to plant an apple tree, it is still very exciting to be able to watch how a tree grows out of a tiny seed!
All you need for your experiment is a little pot with some earth in it and a saucer. If you do not have a plant pot with holes in the bottom, use an old yoghurt pot and pricks some holes in the bottom yourself. This is very important, because the seed will like moist earth to grow in, but if the soil stays too wet it will rot! The holes in the bottom of your pot will allow any excess water to escape. Put the pot on a saucer or in an old margarine tub to stop this water from spilling all over the place. Plant your seed just below the surface of the earth in your pot. Don’t forget to give it a bit of water every day, because your seed can only open and start growing if the earth around it is damp. The wet earth will help to soften the hard skin of the pip. Put your pot on a windowsill, because all plants need light to grow. Now you have to be very patient, because it takes as long as 4-8 weeks for your little seed to start growing.
Important: If your apple seed has not been through a cold period, the pips may not germinate. You can remedy this by putting the seeds in the fridge for 6-8 weeks to simulate winter. The best way to do this is by putting the seeds in some damp sand or peat-moss (not too wet or the seeds may rot) in a plastic bag. Often the Apples you but have been in cold storage and that might be sufficient to make the seeds think they've been through the winter.

If you have space on the windowsill, you can try to grow pips from different sort of apples and see which one will be the first to push up its little head through the earth. You can write on the pots with a waterproof felt-tip pen what day you planted the seed and from which sort of apple it came. When your seed starts growing as a tiny little plant, just think what a miracle it is that this tiny titchy thing could one day be a large tree with a big trunk, strong enough for you to climb in!

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Apple Games

A long time ago, before the Romans introduced Christianity to Britain, Halloween was the beginning of the Celtic New Year. The people saw that all the leaves were falling everywhere off the trees. At the same time they knew that all the seeds from the trees and other plants, which had fallen on the ground, were being buried. And these seeds would start a whole new round of seasons!
So the Old Celts thought: “This is a good time to celebrate the beginning of a new year, because the old year is dying and the seeds are starting a new one!”

Halloween is a celebration of the old year and all the fruits and food the old year has given us. It is also a celebration of the seeds, which will renew all of Nature in the new year to come.

Since death and new life were so close together at this time of the year, they also remembered all the dear dead people who have gone before us. They were grateful and respectful to their ancestors for all the knowledge and love they had once given to human society. To remember this they often put a little light in a skull. This represented the fact that the knowledge of the dead ancestors was still a shining light in their lives.
We still practice this tradition today by putting candles in Pumpkins or hollowed-out Swedes, but after such a long time not many of us remember why we do this. Our practice of dressing up as ghosts and telling creepy stories is also a leftover from the old custom of remembering the dead people.

Our ancient ancestors imagined paradise as an Apple Orchard. For all these reasons Halloween was also know as “The Apple Festival”. Here are some of the traditional Apple Festival games, which probably have been played for thousands of years:

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Apple bobbing

Fill a wide bowl, such as a washing-up bowl, with water. Put as many apples in the water as there are people wanting to take part in the game. The apples will hover on the surface of the water, because they have a lot of air in them. Everyone in turn has to try to pick an apple out of the bowl with their teeth without using their hands. This is not easy, because the apples float. When you try to touch them with your mouth, you can’t help pushing them away. The easiest way to catch an apple it is to push it down to the bottom, where it cannot move so freely. Put your teeth in it and bring it up! Everyone is going to get rather wet, but that is all part of the fun!

Apple Bobbing is quite a well-known party game, but many people do not know that there is a second part to this game. To play this you need another bowl, which is filled with dry white flour. Place a nut (for example a hazelnut) on top of the flour. After people have caught an apple, and whilst their face is still wet, they now have to pick the nut from the flour, again without using their hands. Of course the flour will stick to all these wet faces. Every one will look like a Halloween ghost!
Have a couple of face cloths and a towel ready for your ghostly guests to wash themselves. If you play the game indoors, it is also a good idea to spread an old sheet of plastic on the floor before you begin, because the game cannot be played without drips and a bit of mess.
Tradition says that

“the one who catches the largest apple from the bowl
may become the richest of all.”

It is customary that every one who has taken part attempts to peel their apple in one long unbroken spiral. This is not easy. My Granny used to be a dab hand at doing this, but she had a long life of practice. If you manage to do it, you are allowed a wish. Throw the spiral apple peel over your left shoulder whilst you make your wish

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Apples on a string:

Preparation: Hang a line across the room or, if you are outside, between two trees (the washing line will do if you have no trees). Prepare sufficient apples for everyone who wants to take part in the following way. Pierce them with a metal barbecue stick, a tent peg or another sharp thin object such as a screwdriver. This allows you to put a string through the apple and hang it on the line. Make sure the string is long enough for the smaller children to reach the apple with their mouth. Everyone has to try and take a bite out of an apple without using their hands. If they succeed, the string is taken down and they can have the apple.

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Passing the Apple

Put an apple underneath your chin and hold it there - without using your hands!- by pressing it down against your collarbone.
The next person has to take this apple from you (again without using hands) by getting very close to you and trying to grab it with their chin.
If they cannot do it without making the apple fall, they have to "pay a forfeit". That means that the person, who passes the apple on can ask them to do something. This can be something silly or embarrassing, such as Standing on a chair and singing a song loudly, Pretending to be a dog and being stroked by everyone, Pushing the apple with their nose from one end of the room to the other. Try and think yourself of lots of other good forfeits for the game.

A variation of the game can be played if there are enough people to make two teams. Each team stands in a row and has an apple. Which team can pass the apple from chin to chin along the whole row first? If the Apple falls, the team has to start from the beginning again.

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Making an Apple Pig

Pigs like apples as much as we do, but luckily they are not as fussy as people, who will only eat perfect apples! On many old-fashioned farms, the family pig was let out into the orchard in the autumn to eat all the windfall apples lying on the ground. The pig did a marvellous job tidying all the apples up like a giant pink vacuum cleaner!

You can make an orchard pig from two (pinkish?) apples and a few long matches or cocktail sticks. Looking at the drawing will help you to understand how to make the pig: Use a large apple, preferable with a stalk on it for the tail as the body. If you do not have a stalked apple, improvise the tail from other material. Use the smallest apple you can find for the head and cut it in half, in such a way that the apple-core looks like the pig’s nose. If you don’t want the pig’s face to go brown (as cut apples do!) dip the cut side into a little lemon juice or vinegar. Use two raisins for eyes and tiny leaves from the garden or pieces of angelica for ears. Stick 4 matches onto the body for legs. Join the head to the body by sticking a long match or cocktail stick half into the body-apple and half into the face-apple. Oink-Oink!

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Making an Apple Orchard Mural

Making an apple orchard on the wall of your bedroom is a fun project, which can be done in many ways, depending on your choice of materials. The idea is that you make or paint an apple tree, which is dedicated to each group of people, ideas and things, which are important in your life. You can then make apples to represent each of the people, ideas or things and hang them in the tree. Here are some examples:

• An apple tree dedicated to all the members in your family. Different branches of the family could of course have apples of different branches of the tree.

• An apple tree with apples for each your friends, neighbours and other people which are important in your life. Maybe this apple tree can also include your pets.

• An apple tree for all the skills and knowledge you have gathered in your life.

• An apple tree for all your favourite celebrities, sport-heroes and so on.

• An apple tree for all the places you have been to.

• An apple tree for all the kind things and good deeds people are capable of doing.

• An apple tree for all the games you know.

• An apple tree for all the things you like to do when you grow up.

• An apple tree for all the experiences and happenings you love to remember.

• An apple tree with all the best jokes you’ve heard.

•  An apple tree to celebrate all the different trees you know.

• An apple tree to celebrate all the different animals you know.

• An apple tree for all of your favourite cartoon characters and other fictional people or creatures.

You can create as many apple trees as you like or you can only make a few. You can do one tree at the time or create the whole orchard as a weekend or holiday project. The choice is up to you. As your life grows and you do more things and discover things your apple orchard will grow as well and there will be more and more apples on your trees!

How to make the trees:

• You can paint the trees with poster-paints on the back of a roll of old wall paper.

• You can buy coloured cardboard to cut out the shapes of the trees.

• You can collect big cardboard boxes, out of which you can cut trees to paint. The trees can be pinned up individually on your wall.

• You can do it any other way you fancy, for example making trees as a collage from pictures out of magazines and so on.

Write on each apple what they represent or draw a picture on them. You can glue the apples to the tree, but sticking them on with a drawing pin or a sewing pin makes it easier to re-arrange your apples once the tree gets very full. 

How to make apples:

• Cut them out of coloured cardboard. Maybe you can afford to buy a gold or silver pen to make the writing look very pretty.

• Paint them on a bit of paper and cut out.

• Draw them with felt-tip pens, crayons, etc. and cut them out.

• Cut pictures out of magazine in the shape of an apple. This is a good way to make apples for your favourite actors, musicians, sporting heroes, cartoon character and so on.

When you sit in bed and look at your apple orchard you can wonder about the magic of all these apples in your orchard, which contribute to your life! You can also wonder how they influence each other.

Good luck with your orchard project!

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What is bad tempered and goes with custard?

(Apple grumble)

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