Moving Beyond the Page/BFIAR-Blueberries for Sal

This week was Blueberries for sal. I was REALLY wanting to do this book when we could go blueberry picking along with it, but blueberry season is about 6 months off. We made the best of it, and used frozen berries for our snacks.

I did something a little different this week, and included my daycare kids as much as possible in the activities. (No pics of them.) I am actually going to be using Before Five in a Row with them, and this just happens to be one of the BFIAR books. :) Most of the kids are 2 and 3 years old, so I just had to adjust and add activities to keep it on their level. They are getting old enough to tag along in our homeschooling adventure now, and this looked like a really fun book to start out with.


On our first day, we read the book and discussed it. We also had a  book about bears to read later in the week.

Lily LOVED the first activity in the MBTP workbook this week-making Blueberry Freezer Jam. We talked about how the characters in the book were going to can some blueberries for Winter, and how this would be one thing you can make with the blueberries.

                             Crushing the berries.

 Mixing in the sugar.

                   Stirring in the pectin.                                   

 Finished!

For our math this week, we made little "tin" pails, and counted "blueberries." Lily spent a good deal of time adding different amounts of blueberries, and figuring out different ways to make them add up to ten.

I added in a fun little craft that I had found on Pinterest: Blueberry pies. We used bingo daubers as our blueberries.

The second day was pretty fun,  but it was mostly a conversational lesson. We talked about whether the book took place now or in the past. (The past)  We pointed out the different items in the pictures that helped us figure that out. Lily also had fun with a movement activity. We looked through the book, and found all the different ways the characters moved. Lily got to move in the way that SHE interpreted those words. (A lot of them looked pretty similar.) ;)

We made dye out of blueberries and their juice. I had the kids crush up the blueberries and I added a bit of water. We put a white cloth in the juice, and let it sit overnight. The kids thought it was pretty awesome that the cloth was purple the next day.

 We made some blueberry muffins for snack. Lily LOVED this. She just couldn't wait to try them, and she approved of the final product.

We researched bears, and read a book about bears. We talked about the fiction and non-fiction aspects of the bears in Blueberries for Sal, and made a chart to compare. We had fun singing The Bear Went Over the Mountain. (Mommy can't sing, so we found a video on Youtube)

We made a bear craft. Lily is still developing her fine motor skills, so I found an outline of a teddy  bear online, and we just tore some brown paper and glued it on. The tearing is good for developing fine motor skills.

I set up a variety of activities with the counting bears. The grabbers in the sensory bin, and the tweezers for the "feed the bear" game are also great for fine motor skills.

 
We had a couple of KinderBach piano lessons this week. Lily loves KinderBach days. KinderBach is a DVD based piano lesson program for kids age 3-7. There is cutting/pasting, coloring, piano practice and more. It's super cute!

 

Another activity that I found on Pinterest was these blueberry basket crafts. Just paint the berries on the paper, and glue craft sticks on them to make it look like a basket.

We have the Draw Write Now series, and I love when I find something that goes along with our theme. Lily drew a bear, and practiced the little handwriting paragraph that was in the book.

Our final activity was another snack-Blueberry Parfaits! Yum! Yogurt, blueberries and whipped topping. Lily definitely approved!

So, that was our fun week! Lots of fun activities. Lily also works on her Singapore Math and McRuffy phonics/reading every week in addition to the other activities. She is having a great time!

Moving Beyond the Page/FIAR-Harold and the Purple Crayon

This week we read Harold and the Purple Crayon. This was a cute story about a boy who used his imagination. Since this was a FIAR story as well as a MBTP story, we started off by placing the story disk. Since the book didn't actually tell us where the story took place, I let Lily pick. She chose Pennsylvania. I think she picked it because on our map, PA is purple. :)

I put some butcher paper on the wall and let Lily go to town. She thought this was fun, because this is as close to drawing on the walls as she will ever be allowed. I told her to draw whatever she wanted. Lily is JUST now starting to get to the point where she will draw/color anything more than just a few lines.

We watched an episode of How It's Made: Crayons on Youtube. Lily found that pretty interesting, since she uses them all the time. :) You can find the episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2xRBnFABV0

We also found lots of Harold and the Purple Crayon episodes to watch on Youtube. I didn't realize that it had been a series at one point, and it was really cute. You can find some episodes here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px6P_HbufUw&list=PLzp2aWF9BS_RhhGNRO5yFuSPt31d_TDre

Lily was still in dinosaur mode from last week, so we watched a Harold and the Purple Crayon episode with dinosaurs. (The dino is NOT eating the flying dino in the second pic-it just looks like that for some reason)

We talked about the phases of the moon, and why the moon looks like it changes  it's shape depending on when you look at it.

   

Since we were talking about the moon, I decided to do an activity that would demonstrate how craters are formed. I put some flour in a bowl and gave Lily some coins. She held them up high, and dropped them into the flour. Lily saw how the coins made "craters" in the flour, just like asteroids and rocks make craters on the surface of the moon.

 We discussed the color purple, and that it is a Secondary color. We talked about both Primary and Secondary colors, and Lily made a color wheel.

 I had seen some melted crayon art on Pinterest, and this just seemed like the perfect unit to do that activity. I got a new box of crayons, hot glued them to some poster board, and Lily got to work.

We talked about flat vs solid shapes, and talked about cubes and rectangular prisms. Lily was tracing some cubes and rectangles that she had found around the house.

Lily took the purple materials in her MBTP kit and made a purple collage.

One of the activities this week was to draw a neighborhood map. Lily took a LONG time on this project. I wasn't allowed in the kitchen until she was finished-she said it was a surprise. (Yes, she was wearing a Belle dress while she worked on this project)

Later in the week, we talked more about the cubes and rectangular prisms, and Lily made them out of marshmallows and toothpicks. Her favorite part was eating the marshmallows. ;)

I found a transportation sorting activity on TeachersPayTeachers.com, and Lily sorted things by Air, Land and Water.

She added a drawing to her reading/writing workshop journal.

Our last activity was one that I saw at http://homeschoolingmom2mags.blogspot.com/2014/07/harold-and-purple-crayon.html

We had a pie picnic! We made a purple Jello pie, a blueberry pie and a chicken pot pie. 

The purple Jello pie:

Lily making her blueberry pie:

Making the chicken pot pie:

A Pie Picnic! It was pretty tasty!

Lily approved! Yum!

 This week was fun! We are looking forward to Blueberries for Sal next week!