Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Our Five in a Row pick for this week was Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?.  Written by Nancy White Carlstrom and illustrated by Bruce Degan,  it is a delightful rhyming story about a little bear’s day with his mom.  I absolutely adore the illustrations in the Jesse Bear series.

We read a lot about patterns.  We looked for patterns throughout the story in the wallpaper and their clothes, we found patterns in our own closets, and since it was laundromat day, we went on a pattern hunt around base.  We found patterns in many of the buildings and in the floor tiles.  We also made our own with gummy bears.

We hung “Jesse’s” laundry out to dry with clothes pins.  Clara really enjoyed this and spent at least 30 minutes hanging laundry – Benjamin had no interest.

We discussed dressing for different kinds of weather.  I surprised them with these felt weather bears.  Clara LOVED these bears.  I think she spent 3 hours dressing them the first day.  She played with them all week and  I found her narrations to be most amusing.  Benjamin dressed the boy bear once and lost interest. 

In the story illustrations, Jesse Bear’s home has shapes on the carpet.  We worked with pattern blocks and discussed different shapes.  I’m amazed at how Benny seems to notice shapes everywhere now.  He has found hexagons in restaurant floor tiles and in shopping carts…I never would’ve noticed these.

Clara enjoyed sorting the shapes by color and made neat stacks.

We also painted a “tablecloth” with shapes on it.  They always love when the sponges come out.

We recreated Jesse Bear’s healthy lunch and practiced rhymes from the story.  Printables from Homeschool Share.

Carrots and peas and a little more please…

Juice from a pear and rice in my hair…

We also read about oral hygiene and watched a Brain-Pop Jr video about teeth and practiced flossing with play-doh and legos.

We painted eggs with coffee and tried to brush it off with toothpaste.  It was really hard to get off! No wonder why my teeth are in desperate need of whitening!  I drink a lot of coffee.

We learned that tooth enamel is the hardest part of our bodies and observed what would happen if we eat too much acidic food and neglect our teeth.  We soaked an egg in vinegar and witnessed what happened to the shell.  After a few hours, it was so soft it caved right in with barely any touch.  Now Benjamin walks around scolding us for drinking acid.  Haha!

After all of that talk about tooth care and healthy foods, we made Rice Krispy treats and settled in for teatime.  We invited our weather bears, used our tablecloth of shapes for decoration and slurped a Monster Capri-Sun in honor of Halloween.

They had fun in water to float my bubbles and boat.

In addition to Jesse Bear, I began Logic of English Foundations A with Ben.  The first few lessons spend a lot of time practicing blending sound segments.  I “unglued” a clothing item with sound segments and they got to dress up in the matching attire.  This was difficult, but they loved getting bundled up.

We practiced handwriting in sprinkles.  They both loved this and it was Clara’s high point of the day.  And yes, I did catch them dipping their tongue into the tray more than once.

Other fun things we did this week…

The base put on the annual big Halloween Fest.  It is the bases largest event as Italians don’t celebrate Halloween.  They had donkey rides, bounce houses, a haunted house, a pumpkin patch, and lots of candy!

Can you find the ninja?

We also attended the homeschool party this week.  They played a few games, munched some candy, and ran wild round the field.

To finish off the week we blasted rockets off with the boy scouts — they were all so thrilled!  Derek built the rocket and Benny painted it.

When his rocket launched, it shot straight to the side and exploded with a big flame bursting out.  I was fairly certain his rocket was going to set the field on fire.

One of the boy’s rocket landed high up in a tree.  The poor boy was desperate to launch it a second time.  Derek tried to knock it down with a ball.  He had great aim, but the string was wrapped around the branch too tightly.

Wow it was a busy week!  So much going on, but we had a great time.  Next week we’ll keep having fun with bears when we read Blueberries for Sal.

I forgot to mention the broken bones.  Early in the week we took the bikes out to the piazza to enjoy some fresh air.  He was riding his bike on top of the fountain (which is several steps up), wasn’t watching where he was going and drove his bike right off of the top and landed on his wrist.  Luckily it was just a buckle fracture and was quick to heal.