Blueberries for Sal- 2008

Every year we row Blueberries for Sal when the blueberries are ripe for picking here in NY which is the end of July. J3 simply adores this book (as do I) and we read it nightly. I decided to involve all the kids this year by using the lapbook from Hands of a Child. There's a lot of content in there on blueberries, fruits, bears, what animals do for the winter, bear hibernation...among other things. All the kids have been putting together a lapbook. We also did a blueberry graph surveying how many people like various blueberry treats. We asked the FIAR moms and they heartily delivered!

R8 did a fantastic job taking two flats of blueberries and putting them into Ziploc storage for the freezer. Nothing like fresh frozen blueberries to make blueberry yummies with all winter long.

The first night home with our blueberries- bought by the flat from the farm not picked this year. The weather in July was super unpredictable and we find blueberries difficult to gather in large numbers. We made a blueberry cobbler.

E9 recorded our data by tally off of the FIAR website. We had a sample size of 104 people. We posted twice because the kids decided that our original sample size was not big enough to yield reliable results. There was no way muffins were going to beat everything out by a long shot. Not on our watch! We had to gather more data to see if this influenced our results.

R8 works diligently on her bar graph. Of course we are working on correct graph construction. Unlike many of the kids I taught back in the day, my kids will go into sixth grade knowing how to make a proper graph- labels, units, and all!!

I-6's final graph. Note that muffins beat out fresh blueberries by a small margin. Obviously, most participants have not tasted our blueberry pancake recipe!

Through Dawn's blog, I found this blueberry craft

I think the finished product is very nice. I was thinking of stamping on some small tote bags. So cute!

We learned about where bears live around the world (north of the equator) and what kind of plant blueberries grow on. There's something for older and younger kids in this project pack. We plan to add one fact about each bear tomorrow.

This cool mini-book shows a bear species and its range around the world. For some reason the polar page is huge.

We will have a few more things to add to our lapbooks tomorrow before calling it another great year with Blueberries for Sal. This was sort of our warm up to the new school year which begins on Monday at our house. I know...it's only August, but we've been off for 11 weeks already! Time flies and all that... Besides, I think the weather may be turning already. I'll keep you posted.