We did it; we survived the first week.
So I chose to start our year with a weekly book study and the first story we read was Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCluskey. We started our day getting into a morning routine - dressing, eating breakfast, etc. which is a bit of a change for us, and were ready at 8am to start. First we prayed for a successful school day and then we had a short circle time with songs. I asked the children to bring me whatever stories they'd like to listen to and we sat and read for a while. At the end I brought out the book we were looking at that day and we read the story. I asked the boy to try a narration, telling the story back to me, and he did fairly well with that.
After our story time we played a scavenger hunt game, looking for 'blueberries' ourselves - in this case blue circles with the alphabet on them, and we put them in order. All of that took quite some time. Finally, after our game, we made blueberry muffins for a snack and school was done. I wrote a detailed post on how our first day went here.
On Tuesday we got a lot distracted by grocery shopping followed by library club for the boy. By the time we got home we really hadn't *done* school very much at all. At bedtime we read a whole bunch of storybooks and the first two chapters of our new read aloud - The Mouse and the Motorcycle.
On Wednesday the children kept talking about the blueberry alphabet scavenger hunt - so they played it again by themselves. Then we read Blueberries for Sal again. After our story I brought out a quart of blueberries and we sorted them into piles according to size and made alphabet shapes with them...and then ate them for snack. We looked up blueberry bushes in our beginners field guide and learned that wild bushes can grow one to three feet high - and we measured that with a measuring tape. For lunch the children made blueberry snack by spreading blueberry jam on crackers and topping with a slice of salami.
In the afternoon the children did a maze I had drawn to bring Little Sal to the blueberry patch and home again. They loved watching me draw it and we ended up drawing a lot of mazes together.
On Thursday we read our book and then we played for an hour or so with a fantastic homemade blueberry scented playdough. Then we made jam just like Sal and her mother, and then the boy went to the library for day camp.
While he was doing that the girls and I took out some more books from the library for read-alouds.
On Friday I had big plans all week to do a game with blue water balloons but I couldn't get to the store. Soooo...we read the book again and played with our blueberry playdough again and read some more.
I feel pretty good about the week. After the first day we stopped with circle time and didn't quite manage to pick it back up again, and we also only did that one narration. I thought that re-reading the book multiple times throughout the week would end up being boring for the children but they actually really seemed to like it - go figure. The baby was furious with me every time I picked up the book to read because I wasn't paying attention to her, but I think that will just fade away eventually. And cutting out the other read-alouds before our focus book was a good idea; everyone seemed much more fresh.
I'm glad we are only spending one week on each book because by Thursday, I will admit, I was tired of Blueberries for Sal. Haha.
Next week we're reading Mrs. McNosh Hangs Up Her Wash by Sarah Weeks.
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