BFIAR: Blueberries for Sal (and tot school: blue and circles)

Book: Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

Ages: 19 months, 23 months, 40 months

 

 

This was one of my favorites! Not because the book is all that great (in my opinion) but because the kids loved it so much and there were a lot of fun things to do--all involving blueberries of course:)

 

This was the second week I tried to focus on a color and shape as well as other concepts and involve all three kiddos in the activities.  It went very well!

 

Each morning we would read the book during or after breakfast.  They asked for it every day, which always makes me happy (it was probably because I usually gave them blueberries during or after!)

 

A few days we did different activites and rotated around the table.  I definitely feel like I have a little tot school happening here!

 

I honestly didn't even look in the BFIAR manual this week.  I forgot to because I didn't need any extra ideas.  We didn't get through all the ideas that I had, but it was still a very fun week.

Learning stations that we rotated:

 

1. Putting "blueberries" in a container (blue puff balls)

2. Placing blue poker chips in a container

 

3. Feeding Little Bear

We did a lot of cooking and baking with blueberries!!!

Pancakes:

Muffins:


Blueberry Jam:


  

We also made blue rice! It was my first time dying rice and turned out to be VERY easy!
In a plastic dish, we mixed about 2.5 cups of rice and 2 T vinegar with the food coloring.  Shake it around and laid it on cookie sheet to dry.  It was ready by the time they were up from nap. 

 

 

 

My kids have been doing rice sensory bins for a long long time.  It's amazing how colored rice captures their attention so much more! 

Declan had learned the color blue by the time he was done playing.  He LOVED it!

I love when they have something they can all do together:) They played with this every single day this week.



Printables:

 

 

For snack one day I quickly drew this "blueberry bush" and they had fun putting their blueberries in their "bucket" like Sal.

Another learning station rotation day:

1. Gluing blue circles on the bush

2. Stamping blue thumbprints on the bush

3. Using the dot marker (Raelynn actually is gluing here, but you can see her dots!) as blueberries on the bush.

Another idea that is currently in the freezer is having the kids break the bears and blueberries out of ice! I put them in a plastic dish and filled with water.  I plan to give them some "tools" and they have to break free the bear.  I figure if they don't have much interest in breaking free the plastic bear, they will definitly want the blueberries! :)

 

BFIAR: The Snowy Day (and tot school: circles and white)

Books: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats and Frozen (Little Golden Book) by Disney
 

 
 

 

Color Focus: White

Shape focus: Circle

Ages: 18 months, 23 months, 40 months


This week's story was The Snowy Day and it was so fun! SO many things to do with snow.  This was my first attempt at focusing on a shape and color.  It's a little more effort to do that, but just takes some pre-planning. 
Circles are definitely an easy shape to do because they are everywhere and they tied in perfect with snowmen, snowballs, and snow.  And if we are going to be reading about snow I figured we had to tie in something that is quite popular with our kids right now--Frozen!!  Amazon had the Little Golden Book for $2.99 a couple weeks ago so I couldn't resist to get it.  We read it every.single.day.

Do you want to build a snowman?  Our felt board for the week:

Circles for pizza night!

Fine Motor practice: stringing circle noodles onto spaghetti

 

 

Drawing with chalk.  Olaf was making his appearance everywhere this week!

More motor skills practice: scooping and grabbing "snow" in circle cupcake tin

 

 

Dot markers--more circles!

 

 

Declan needs practice with sorting so I pulled this out one day because it had circles

 

Circle stickers!

 

Circle poker chips. We found them while cleaning the garage.  Mommy knew that she could put them to use:)

 

 

Fun with marshmallows: painting, stacking, counting, stringing on a skewer

 

 

and the most fun was a snowball fight!!

 

I refrained from taking pictures and just enjoyed the moments with my kids.  It was so fun! They liked hiding behind the forts so they could go try to eat the marshmallows, haha.  Mommy and Daddy had fun with it!

 

In The Snowy Day, Peter makes tracks with his feet in the snow.  They had fun making tracks in white play dough. We got a variety of animals out and compared the footprints. 

 

We had a lot of Frozen printables this week.  We didn't get through them all!

 

 

 

The Snowy Day printables:

Doing a story retell with pictures

 

Number clips: her first time doing this with the clothespins and she did so well! Definitely will repeat this!

 

She circled all the "S" on the page and all while Mommy was upstairs--she was so pleased with herself!

 

Resources:
 Frozen Q-tip printables
Frozen Tot Pack
The Snowy Day printables
Borax Snowflakes


 

BFIAR: The Carrot Seed, The Little Rabbit, and ABC Bunny

It wasn't my original intent, but I just didn't get activities planned, printed, or ready for the week I had these books planned.  They followed along nicely with Runaway Bunny and lots of bunny things were online because we did it around Easter, but it just didn't happen. 

Some weeks are like that, right?! So we just read these books each day and did a few activities.  I'm sure I could have been a little more creative, but there just wasn't a lot of time the past couple weeks.  So these all got jumbled into the course of a couple weeks and then we just moved on:)

Books:
The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss


The Little Rabbit by Judy Dunn

The ABC Bunny by Wanda Gag



The ABC Bunny book has a song in it and I think I sang that more than I read the book! ha.

Some things we did with The Carrot Seed was writing with a carrot in a salt tray, painting with a carrot, and counted carrots.

Some ideas I think would've been fun are making carrot cake together and planting seeds of some kind.  

It did work out that we planted grass in the back yard while reading this book so we could relate that to it. 

And if course lots to do with bunnies and rabbits. I hope you have a better week(s) with these books than we did!