Ask Mr. Bear {BFIAR} + More!

You're about to get a glimpse of the last two weeks rather than one.

Life has gone mad.

(In a good way!)

We've been incredibly busy.

And summer has slowly begun to emerge.

In other words, those random warm, sunny days have us outside, soaking it all in.

I'm pretty sure we will never be year round homeschoolers for this very reason.

The thing is: the learning never stops on such days.

Its just a million times less structured and planned out.
(Which is wonderful and good in its own right!)

Anyhow, here is what we've been up to on those days that were less so-sunny-they-were-calling-us-outside-beautiful....

As I mentioned in a previous post, we spent a week on the book Rabbits and Raindrops by Jim Arnosky.

This was not specifically a BFIAR book but recommended as a companion to The Little Rabbit.

It provided a wonderful opportunity to compare and contrast the pet rabbit (from The Little Rabbit) to wild rabbits (as found in Rabbits and Raindrops).

This led to a discussion about camouflage.

We had great fun learning to pronounce this new vocabulary word!

But it was a little difficult to fully explain without a bit of a demonstration.

Thankfully, I found a wonderful website that had a game that provided a perfect way to learn about camouflage: Sheppard Software.

This site is full of kid friendly resources!

And it had the coolest game where the kids could pick an animal and then play a game where severeal different pictures would be shown to them in which they had to find that camouflaged animal!

Some were easy, others took me a minute to find!

(The picture above is an example from the camouflage page with the hidden animals highlighted.)

Both my girls had a blast with this!

Rabbits and Raindrops' illustrations feature many different insects found in the wild rabbits' habitat.

The girls enjoyed discovering them in the illustrations.

We ended up making a butterfly like the one that finds refuge under the rabbits' hedge during a rainstorm.

We used the colors Tait is working with in her Tot Time (post to come!) and focused on color mixing and prints (ie. we painted one butterfly wing and used it to make a print on the other).

There is also a salamander to be found in the illustrations.

Talk about perfect timing!

We went to visit our friends - Laura, Mia and Kye - and they had some salamander eggs that they were so sweet as to share with us!

Yep!

We now have praying mantis eggs in our bathroom and salamander eggs in our basement...

On to this past week.

We 'rowed' Ask Mr. Bear by Marjorie Flack.

It's about a little boy named Danny who is looking for the perfect birthday gift for his mother.

He asks the advice of several different animals until he gets the perfect idea from Mr. Bear - a big Birthday Bear Hug!

I specifically picked this book for this week because Matt's birthday is coming up and we were planning a party for Friday night.

As their gift to him, the girls painted a puppet theatre I assembled from a cardboard box, colored and cut out the animals and gift suggestions from the story, glued popsicle sticks to the back to create puppets and performed a puppet show of the story the night of the party!

At the end of the show, they gave their Daddy his very own Birthday Bear Hug!

Definitely my favorite moment of the whole week!

But they didn't stop there!

You see, we had also discussed 'advice' as part of our learning about the story.

We talked about how its good to sometimes ask others advice but you don't have to take their advice.

The girls put this into practice by calling various family members and asking what they thought Piper and Taitum should get their Daddy for his birthday!

My little phone talkers LOVED this part of the project!

Once they collected everyone's advice, we put together a puppet show similar to Ask Mr. Bear in which they presented what everyone's advice was and their final decision to take Mrs. Mama's advice: Put on a fabulous puppet show for their Daddy!