Blueberries for Sal: Day One

For our second week (or time) of rowing we chose to read Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey. This is a really cute book about a little girl and her Mama who go out on a hillside to pick blueberries to store them for the upcoming winter. The book was published in 1948 and is a 1949 Caldecott Honor award winning book and to me, seems like a timeless classic, it's a sweet one. 

For lunch we had breakfast foods and I made sure to serve plenty of blueberries!

We had fresh blueberry pancakes, fresh blueberries and scrambled eggs.

And almost everything was served in or on some shade of a blue dish.

After lunch we went down to our classroom and started with some "doh-berry" finger isolation squash counting. In the photo below you can see that Vada extends all of her fingers while using her pointer to push the "doh-berry". What I can't show you is the work that her and I did together, the real work. Vada needs to work on isolating all of her fingers except the finger that she wants to use, in this case her pointer finger. Once I put the camera down, I helped Vada isolate all of her fingers by holding them into a fist while she used her pointer to squish each doh-berry. After she pushed her pointer into one doh-berry I would let go of her hand and have her put that pushed down piece of puddy back into it's container and then I would grab her hand and we would do it again. After four or five times of doing this, I could tell that she was getting the hang of what we were doing. 

After all of the play-doh balls had been pushed back into its container I rolled it back into one big ball and added a couple of smaller animals and had Vada use her pincer grasp to get the tiny critters out.

Today was all about fine motor skills! I didn't intend for it to be that way but it just turned out to be one of those kinds of day! After playing with the play-doh we used pom-poms as our blueberries for our next activity. I brought out three different tweezers and showed Vada how to use them and what I wanted her to do with them. I wanted her to use the tweezers to pick up the "berries" and drop them into the basket. 

As you may notice, she needs some help with the grasp on the tweezers. Once again this was something that we worked on together, once I put the camera down.

After working on it together she did show improvement on her own!

And, she even got some "blueberries" into the basket. Sure, she may have picked most of them up with her pincer but hey, we're working on it!

Next we worked on an all blue puzzle. Before I go on let me just clarify that I did this puzzle. I asked Vada to help hand me pieces of the puzzle as well as asked her to turn the pieces over so that we could see the picture on the piece. To keep her engaged, I continued to talk as I put the puzzle together. I talked about every photo that we saw as I was connecting the pieces together. 

Vada was very observant throughout this time. She notice the sucker immediately and began pretending to lick a sucker and pointing to it as soon as I put the pieces together to complete the picture. She noticed the fish and signed fish and she pointed to the blueberries and signed "grapes" which is what she has always signed for blueberries. Now that I think of it, I should go figure out what the sign for blueberries actually is...

Earlier in the day I had prepared this "pie" for Vada to use her fingers to paint her very own blueberries on to.

Vada has a love/hate relationship with getting messy. She thoroughly enjoys crafts but becomes slightly uncomfortable at the mess she sometimes gets into. 

Of course the pie went onto "the I Did That Wall".

So, after making blueberry finger paint pie, Vada got into an all blue bath.

And then got out wrapped up in a soft, warm baby blue towel.

 After Vada was lathered in lotion and put into her p.j.'s we cuddled up onto the couch to watch Blueberries For Sal from our Scholastic's Storybook Treasure Dvd set.