Community Church Co-Op: The Apple Doll

This book is one of my favorites! The Apple Doll by Elisa Kleven is about a little girl, Lizzie, who has an apple tree outside her house. She is afraid to start school and the morning she is to leave, she climbs into her tree and picks a shiny apple and attaches a twig body. She feels better having a "friend" to talk to. But at school, no one understands. Her teacher thinks its food and makes her put it away. Her classmates make fun of it for being an apple and having leafy hair. She and her family brainstorm different things they can do to Susanna (the apple doll) to make her last longer. Lizzy's mother shows her how to make Susanna into an apple-head doll by peeling the fruit, carving her features, preserving her with lemon juice, and letting her smiling face wrinkle as it dries. Newly aged but rejuvenated, Susanna accompanies Lizzy to school again and becomes the model for a class craft project. Now Lizzie has lots of friends and they all have apple doll friends as well!

This was our first focus book for Co-op. The kids were really engaged and the boys started shouting, "are we doing to make an apple doll?" before the story was even over. This project needs to be done in stages, but is oh-so-fun!!!

First, each child received one big apple and worked their little finger muscles and motor skills with the apple peelers trying to get the skin off!

Luke.

Kahlan.

Annette.

Eli.

Addison.

In the end, they all had quite a bit of help from the mommies in the room :) but they got to enjoy some tasty apple peels!

While the girls snacked on their peels, the boys went on to design their dolls' faces and clothing. Today they just did it on paper as we needed the heads to dry before attaching their bodies or clothing. They both designed some great apple super heroes!

Next, they all helped describe how they wanted their faces carved onto the apples. This part is really fun as it will distinguish one doll from another; and how the finished product (head) ends up coming out is quite a surprise!

The next step is to soak all the heads in lemon juice for quite some time to help preserve them. Then they go on the lowest setting of your oven for days. These heads took me all week to dry out. Each day you will see the getting smaller and smaller and more wrinkly. They turn into the sweetest of little granny faces.

After apple heads are dry and not wet or spongy anymore they should look something like this:

Insert some beads for eyes...

And add a little color if you want.

They also can turn out something like:

or...

how about this grumpy dude?

or even with the help of paint, like these:

BUT....no. Not ours. Why? Because of 6 days of drying - 6 days of drying to perfection, the night before the kids came back to finish their dolls, I forgot they were in the oven and turned it waaaay up to preheat it for a pie!!!!!!!!!!!! Yep, they burnt. We now had Indian dolls. Or, as you'll see, they turned out a little more maybe Jamaican?

Anyway...After the dolls were dried to a crisp, I took wooden skewers with pipe cleaners attached to them and pushed them up through the heads. Then the pipe cleaner was wrapped around the stick to create the body and then more were attached to make the arms and legs. We had this all done for the children when they arrived. We had also laid out lots of supplies for the kids. They were able to see their dried dolls and start designing their "outer wear" - hair, crowns, hands, feet, capes, belts, shirts, pants, robes, dresses, tutus, necklaces, earings, etc!! It was a BLAST!

Yes, the moms GREATLY enjoyed themselves too :) and although Luke looks a little bored here, I'm sure it's just because they had to be hands-off around the glue gun!

They all turned out very uniquely and the kids just loved them. The moms tossed around the idea of making some for ourselves because we had so much fun too! Check out some of the finished products...