Homeschool–“Blueberries for Sal”

-Abigail is 2.5 years old-

- Adam is 4.75 years old -

We survived our first week of home preschool and tot school!  It went pretty much as expected….lots of juggling and plate-spinning for me.  But we had fun and the kids absolutely loved it!  They asked, and asked, and asked, every morning when we would start school.  And if the baby needed to be fed or I just wasn’t ready at the time I had told them we would start, woo-wee…I heard about it!

Our theme this week was the book Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey.  Using the resources from Before Five in a Row, Homeschool Share, and Homeschool Creations, we did a bunch of fun little activities.  We also read McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings which I love!  I pointed out that the illustrations in “Blueberries” are done with blue ink and the ones in “Ducklings” are done with brown.  I don’t think Adam cared.  But I thought it was interesting!

Abby counted blueberries on a “math mat”.

And Adam did some addition on his “math mat”.

Pre-writing practice tracing lines.

I quizzed Abby on her uppercase letters and she correctly identified the lower group and missed F, K, I, U, W, V, and M.
(Notice my mistake?  There are 27 letters there!  It took me so long starting at this picture to figure out that I somehow got a lowercase y in there!)

Adam working on a puzzle.
This was a little tricky for him.  The picture had thin lines in a grid pattern, so we carefully looked at each square, talked about what we saw, (half white, half black or a lot of green, and a little black, etc.) and then found the matching piece to add to the puzzle.

Making a “directional word” book.
Each page read, “Little Bear is _____ the ______ and they glued Little Bear in the appropriate place.  Well, Adam did.  Abby glued wherever she wanted to!

Adam “reading” me his book!

 

 

Rhyming Word Match

Blue Ink Drawings
Robert McCloskey illustrated Blueberries for Sal using just blue ink so the kids drew pictures with a blue pen.
Adam drew a “fixing machine” with blueberries, a tic-tac-toe board in the left corner and a “twisty part of the machine” called “The Toyota” on the right.  Abby drew a crocodile.

Painting Blueberries
We used pom-poms and blue and purple paint to make blueberry prints.

 

One thing I’m really excited about doing is narration.  I’m hoping to have Adam narrate 1 book a week to me.  His narration of Blueberries for Sal is as follows:

What happened in the story?

“Well, before the end of the story, they got all messed up.
Sal’s mother and Little Sal were picking blueberries.
Bears came and ate some that Little Sal and her mother were gonna pick.
They were picking blueberries and Sal accidentally picked blueberries out her mother’s pail.”

 

(I asked) What happened when they got mixed up?

“They looked behind them and saw that it was not their child.
Sal’s mother was picking blueberries all the way to the car.”

 

My most favorite part of the book was:

“My most favorite part when they were going to the car and picking blueberries for the winter.”

Blueberries sounding “kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk” just like in the story!

I had the great idea to toss some blueberries out in the grass and have the kids “pick” them.  As soon as we got outside, there were huge claps of thunder which sent the kids screaming for cover!  This picture cracks me up.  I’m standing outside, holding a pail in my hand, while my kids are screaming at me from the doorway to come inside so the thunder doesn’t get me.  Mind you, it wasn’t even raining!

So I sat in the grass and picked blueberries by myself.

A fun project we did was making homemade, berry-scented play  dough!  I used a Kool-Aid packet to color and lightly scent the dough.

Rolling balls into “blueberries”


The pail of “blueberries”complete with star and seahorse “cookies”!

We also made Lemon Blueberry Breakfast cake but I forgot to take pictures.  They love helping me in the kitchen and I’m working on embracing the “help” and enjoying the slower, messier process of cooking with kids!

In addition to our theme, Adam started his math and handwriting curriculums and continued with his reading lessons.  (I only took pictures of math).

Here is he working in his math workbook.  This week he used the one’s blocks to count and cross out the incorrect number and trace the correct one.
 

He also counted pictures and circled the correct number on the number line.  This is a breeze for him, but that’s exactly what I want right now.  I don’t want to force my 4 year old to do math that frustrates him!  There will be plenty of time for that in life!

Here’s a picture of the kids playing with the Math-U-See blocks for the first time.

It was a good first week of homeschool!  I’m linking up to Tot School and Preschool Corner.