Two Good Reads for Preschool Halloween

It's almost Halloween again, so our usual favorite Halloween books are out. Ladybug's favorite is still Ghosts in the House! This adorable story involves a witch who takes care of her ghost problem by washing the ghosts in the machine and turning them into useful household linens like curtains and blankets. As a family we've developed a game where Ladybug tosses a blanket over a parent's head, shouting, "Haunted!" Then she yanks the blanket off. Ticklefest follows. I say the game was developed as a family because each parent claims to have invented it. I think Ladybug gets the credit.

The new favorite is Run Home, Little Mouse, which isn't marketed as a Halloween book, so it might be easy to miss. But it's a late fall, spooky nighttime book, making it a great Halloween read. As Little Mouse runs along in the night, he comes across glowing eyes in the darkness, visible through cutout holes in the pages. Turning the page reveals the animals who are peering out at him: fox, owl, weasel, crow, cat, bats, and eventually his own mouse family. This one was an instant hit with Ladybug, who read it repeatedly, recounted the plot to us, and requested it again this morning.

Bonus: we've started the "Spatial Relationships" chapter in math, talking about how things are positioned relative to one another. Bug's favorite is to run up the stairs or the playground ladder and shout, "I'm up above Mama! Mama is down peblow!" While reading Ghosts and Little Mouse, she pointed out the various positions of the ghosts all over the house and talked about how Mouse had to run past all the animals. I love quality book tie-ins that happen spontaneously.

Math: Naming How the World Feels

We've been doing the first chapter in Count on Math, which is about attributes of materials. That's curriculum-speak for adjectives. We went to the beach and felt hot sand and cool, rumbling waves. Before the weather got cool, I set up outside water play with toys for pouring, sinking and floating. I listen as Ladybug observes that the sack of potatoes is very heavy, the food is very hot, water is very wet, and oatmeal is very sticky.

The opportunities for discussion are so numerous that I lose track. I have approached this unit with several books, a few planned activities, and a lot of listening. Bug was already excited to talk about her world, so this gave her another way to do it. She has enjoyed Spiky, Slimy, Smooth: What is Texture? and Wet Dog! We also checked out Dry or Wet by Bruce McMillan.

We've done some cooking together, usually where Bug helps me dump and mix muffin ingredients. We also took a walk and collected leaves, which went along with art (and obviously science). The leaves were brought inside and we fingerpainted them. Today we took about five minutes and played with one "hot" coin and one cold coin.

In between it all we've been seeing friends and getting out in the community. Church School began again, as well as Joyful Noise, our music class. Ladybug was overflowing with happy energy during the first music class. I'm reflecting that, much like her father, for this child music is a necessity that satisfies a very deep need.

When I mentioned to my mom that Ladybug likes poems, mom reflected that poems give words to a feeling or experience, often one that we didn't have a way to talk about before the poem. It seems that the life of a small child is all about these types of intense experiences without words. Parents of toddlers eventually figure out that naming the child's feelings can help with temper tantrums and other outbursts. It's so validating. Mom's idea was that poems are a similar kind of validation. For us, this math chapter has been in the same vein: empower the child to express how her world feels, looks, sounds, and smells.

Blueberry Unit Study

So it turns out that if you borrow every book you can with the word "blueberry" in the title, you wind up with a pretty well-rounded blueberry unit study. This is what we've been doing for the past few weeks. Blueberries are in season, and we planned a trip with friends to go blueberry picking. So I hit the library. There were several books that weren't favorites for one reason or another. Here are the ones that stuck:

Blueberries for Sal. A classic. But I guess I either didn't read this one as a kid, or I have a short memory, because I hadn't realized that Sal is a little girl, not a boy! Excellent, since I have a girl. Sal tromps around blueberry picking in overalls, with no girly pretensions like hair bows. In terms of fitting into the unit, this book is literature, with opportunity to discuss science (how people and animals save food/fat for the winter). There's also material there for social studies (family relationships) and art. I know Blueberries for Sal is a Before Five in a Row book. My copy of BFIAR is still packed away in a box somewhere though. (Um, yeah it was over a year ago that we moved). Anyway, you can't "do blueberries" without this book.

Peter in Blueberry Land is your Scandinavian, Waldorf-y fairy tale, and it's delightful. There is so much to talk about on each page. We enjoyed this book purely for the literature, but you could launch into math discussions about relative size, as protagonist Peter is shrunk down to the size of the fairies in the story and sees nature from that perspective. There are also obvious science tie-ins. I didn't go there this time, since I'm doing this unit with a very young child who is not yet 3.

Blueberries Grow on a Bush by Mari Schuh. Ladybug has surprised me before by enjoying nonfiction, and this one was no exception. It's straight science, the life cycle of the blueberry bush, including pollination and winter dormancy. The photographs are simple and beautiful. There's very little text on each page, making this great for a toddler. Bug chose to read it several times. 
 
One Little Blueberry is a simple counting book. I almost disregarded it when I saw what it was, but I'm glad I didn't because my daughter loves it. I am less than charmed by one blueberry, two red ants, three ladybugs, etc...But that doesn't mean Ladybug won't enjoy it. What saves this book from being an ordinary counting book is the little plot: the one blueberry stays in the story for the whole book, as the increasing insects chase it, all hoping to get a snack. Insects are a nice tie-in for this unit, and my Ladybug (led by her Daddy) wound up observing a wide variety of insects on our actual blueberry picking trip, including a very cool blue dragonfly. For unit purposes, check off math. We counted bugs, and Ladybug read me the numbers on each page. 

Blueberry Mouse is just plain cute. It's a rhyming story of a mouse who lives in a blueberry pie, and tells how she eats up her delicious house. For our purposes, I'm counting it as language/poetry because of the rhyming. You could take a social studies angle that talks about the houses we live in, friends, and neighborhoods. I didn't feel compelled to analyze this book, so we just enjoyed reading it. 

To me, something just as important as the unit is how it came about. My daughter is young, and I'm still feeling out our homeschooling style. Yes, I borrowed all the books and decided we could have fun learning about blueberries in a way that enriched our blueberry picking day trip. That's me planning and directing. But I borrowed a ton more books than we actually read, and I took her lead on what to really focus on. One Little Blueberry is a good example: I almost left it at the library, but I saw how Ladybug liked it, so I brought it home. And it really filled out the math part of the unit. The unit was gentle, always fun and always following Ladybug's interests. And that's the child-led part of joyful learning that is so important to me. 

Blueberry picking is my new favorite summer tradition. There are no thorns (raspberries) and no stooping over (strawberries). I highly recommend it!

Real Counting and Potato Chip Subtraction

Miss Bug has been counting (roughly to 11) for a while now, in that memorized way that children do, without reference to what the numbers mean. More recently, I saw her move to the stage where she properly identified two things. She will carefully arrange her fingers so she's holding up two on each hand, which most adults read as four, but she has her own math language right now. Then, she carefully points to the pair of objects and declares, "Two things! It is two." There was one, two, and many.

Then last week she got to three. She carefully points to each of the three buttons on my shirt, properly counting them and declaring the sum of three. I believe experts say she doesn't fully understand the abstract concept of counting, and believes that each object is being named one, two or three. Whatever is going on, it's a developmental change from her previous stage. Yesterday she counted a row of 7 dots, and though she counted "wrong" because she missed some and concluded that the total was 5, it sure looked like like she understood the task she was trying to tackle. This is all very interesting to observe, and fun to see how it happens without concerted instruction. (However, there's tons of PBS and counting books in our home, plus some nuclear physics for good measure.)

Here's another "how it happened" story. Subtraction: 
We ordered Panera for dinner, which comes with a yummy bag of bad-for-you potato chips as a side. Ladybug saw Daddy's bag of chips and wanted to dig in. Wanting to be fair, yet teach moderation, I said, "How about three chips? You can have three." And I counted them out for her very dramatically. She was appeased (thank god, cause tantrums suck). And she really relished those chips, and talked about how there were three of them. Then, about ten minutes later, she surprised me by announcing, "Now Lady has two chips!" And it was so. Three chips, toddler eats one, equals two chips. So I parroted this back to her, validating her claim. Later, this continued with, "Now Lady has one chip. She does have one chip." 

Although she wasn't watching this video  the day of the potato chip subtraction, I suspect she took her cue from this song, "Elmo's Ducks" where Elmo counts down from four ducks to none. I totally let her watch YouTube videos as a guilty pleasure in the late afternoons, or when I'm trying to have a conversation that isn't interrupted by me being climbed on. So here we are, that's the story of how Ladybug started to subtract.

A Few Moments for Nesting Bowls

In my mind, Ladybug and I have been working on stacking nested bowls. That is our weekly activity from Slow and Steady: Get Me Ready. What that really means is when she is trying to slide her entire body through the back of a kitchen chair or turn drawers into stairs, I realize I should come up with an activity. "What is our Slow and Steady thing? Oh yeah, the nested bowls," I think to myself. That will buy me five minutes!

I grab the measuring cups and line them up smallest to largest, left to right, as the book instructed me. Then I begin nesting smaller cups in larger cups. I think Ladybug stacked (not nested) a couple of them before realizing that the metal cups make an awesome sound when banged together or on the tile floor. And she was off making music!

This is often how our activities go, and I think it's cool that I can't predict where she will take them. The sixty or so seconds when she is on the task I presented add up when repeated over the week, and I see her engage with the game for longer stretches once she is familiar with it.

So many different strands of learning work into these brief moments of directed activity. One of Ladybug's newest books is The Three Bears by Byron Barton. So we also talked about big, medium, and small nesting bowls, just like Papa, Mama, and Baby Bear have.

This afternoon she climbed eagerly onto the bed and quickly nested the three bowls, then turned her attention elsewhere. Did I mention that this activity was scheduled for an 8 month old? Good thing I've only spent a few moments on it!