The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and The Hungry Bear by (my favorite authors) Don and Audrey Wood

What a cute book. My favorite skill that emerged from this week's theme is H's new word: "disguise", which he uses in context. H is 24 months and really loves strawberries, so I knew he'd love the activities I planned with this book.

I printed story pictures for the book from http://humanservices.arkansas.gov/dccece/classroom_docs/littlemouse.pdf
and colored them with crayons (so relaxing and fun) before laminating them and attaching magnets to the back. He enjoyed watching the story being retold on his cookie sheet, and then retelling it. He used the little key to pretend to open the lock and pretended to eat the strawberry. He was hesitant to touch the knife (I taught him well) but used it to pretend cutting the strawberry in half. It was adorable the way he interacted with the pictures.

We picked strawberries at our local "U-Pick" field. H ate them as we went along. After we brought them home and washed them, we pretended to hide them from "hungry daddy" and practiced cutting them in half. I intended to let him cut them with a little guidance, but he insisted that he shouldn't touch a knife - why does that lesson stick but I can't get him to stop throwing toys?

I made 5 large construction paper strawberries to cut in half with child scissors. We have not done a lot of scissor practice, so this was difficult. H is 24 months so I helped a lot, but he felt like he was really accomplishing something. He frayed the edges quite well with short cuts. He ended up tearing it in half, which was great because that ended up being another good lesson in halves. We continued to cut a strawberry each day, until using up all 5 that I had made.

We took a field trip to the pet store to watch real mice, which ended up being rats. H is big on differentiating between something being "real" and something being a "toy" or "pretend". This is fun, and no book or flashcard can replace the real thing. Any time we can go see something real, we try to make that happen.
Side note: That is blue marker on his forehead. If there isn't marker or paint on that boy's body at some point, it hasn't been a fun enough day.

We made strawberries with our handprints and then turned them into thank you notes. Thank you "berry" much. We gave all the thank you notes to people, so I didn't get a picture of them. But the idea came from Pinterest by searching: handprint strawberry.

Of course since strawberries are in season, and we picked so many, we ate a lot of strawberries and I made jam. The unit was fun. The book is adorable. We have to return it to the library, but will probably add this title to H's growing home book collection.

The story is about a hungry bear, but the bear is never pictured. H was interested in the bear, even though he wasn't really part of the story. Next week's theme will satisfy that desire: "We're Going On a Bear Hunt" by Michael Rosen.