Center Grove Orchard

Last Friday, Asher's home school class went to the apple orchard. It was pretty much organized chaos. :) We were told that our group usually gets put into smaller groups and attends the sessions in a rotation: apple sorter, apple orchard hay ride, information on how they plant/grow/harvest apples, and a farm-thing in the barn haymow. This year, our group was let loose to roam the orchard without supervision - which is kind of hard for this organized mama. I wanted some structure so I was a little frustrated but my adventurous husband was along and I was thankful for that. :) I have no idea what order we did things as I can't even remember what I had for lunch yesterday so here are a few highlights:

We watched the apples being sorted and I loved that part. It's so nice for me to know that there's a apple-organizing machine out there. 

The Corn Pool - need I say more? That's where the boys had an unmeasurable amount of fun. I don't know how corn can make a kid so happy.

 

We had a picnic lunch and then let the boys jump on the blob. It's a puffy thing that they all jump on. The boys went to the orchard last year but I was not a witness to this phenomenon before. They didn't do real well on the blob as they ended up throwing sand around most of the time. (Don't they get enough of that at home?!)

We also spent a lot of time on the burlap sack slide. It was a lot of fun. There was no line so we slid down and ran back up, slid down and ran back up... It was a good workout. :) We had all kinds of fun making different combos. Their favorite was to ride down together and then with Dad (more weight equals more distance). We laughed and laughed.

But the best part was the Corn Maze. We spent over an hour in there and no one cried or quit (although I really wanted to quit). It was a pretty big maze and it was nice at the beginning to run into other people that could tell you where they found stuff, but pretty soon we were on our own and were having a difficult time finding the last few things. But we worked as a team and found all ten things on our scavenger hunt.

At the end of the day we each were allowed to pick three apples off the trees - Golden Delicious. We had a lot of fun and were so thankful that we got the homeschool group discount. We plan on going again next year with our group. Thanks AHSAP!!