The Runaway Bunny
This week we “rowed” The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. It’s been a long time since we did anything from Before Five in a Row, and I’ve had most of our activities planned for weeks, so I was ready to jump back in. Coincidentally, this also happened to be the book of the week in the ABC Jesus Loves Me Week 13 lesson plan we were using for our Bible story. I pretty much stuck with the activities in the B4FIAR manual, as well as a couple things from HomeschoolShare.com.
After reading through the story once just to enjoy it, the next time I pointed out to Ian that some of the pictures were black-and-white and some were full color. I didn’t mention the pattern, but I did ask him to predict what we’d see when we turned each page. At first he was just guessing randomly, but then he started getting it right. He never commented on the pattern, but I’m wondering if he’d caught on.
Ian’s had a little trouble grasping the whole concept of patterns. On several occasions over the last year I’ve introduced simple ABAB patterns without any spark of understanding from him. It’s been one of those frustrating things where I just can’t figure out why he doesn’t get it (as in I just want to say, “Come on! Isn’t it obvious what comes next?” Obviously I restrain myself.) I didn’t want push him though, so I’d just drop it, knowing he’d catch on eventually after other gentle exposures. So I was glad the one of the activities (the “rabbit sequence strips”) from the lapbook at HomeschoolShare touched on patterns. (As I’ve shared before I’m not big on lapbooks, but I do like printing and laminating components that can be used as separate activities. I keep everything filed away by book so I can pull them out again when I go through B4FIAR and other special books with my younger children.)
The sequencing activity was extremely simple, but maybe that’s why Ian was successful. I liked the way it established the pattern, but I wish I’d printed out another copy to cut up so he could keep going. (He asked me where the next one was.)
The other activity I used from HSS was the “rabbit perception puzzle.” I actually thought this was going to be too challenging for Ian, but he surprised me by matching all the pictures (some of them were very similar and you had to look really carefully to notice the differences). He was quite pleased with himself when he finished and wanted to do it again.
We also made bunny masks. I’d seen it on several other B4FIAR blogs, and to be honest it always seemed kind of silly to me. It certainly wasn’t on my plan for the week, but while working on our Bible notebook page for this week’s lesson, Ian took the piece of construction paper left from a cut-out and started pretending it was a mask. So I grabbed a few paper plates and made bunny masks for both boys.
Elijah liked it until I tried to put a rubber band on his and then it just made him mad, even after I took it off. Ian, however, wore his around for a while, put it on his stuffed bear, and dragged it around with him for the rest of the day. Each to his own.
Finally, we played the Goodnight Moon game again, though this time we tried a harder level and matched the color cards to the black and white gameboards.
I tried this is Ian a few months back and he couldn’t do it, but this time he whipped through all four gameboards matching every picture without any help at all. So fun to watch them grow!
A few weeks after we “rowed” this book, someone passed along a link to these great storytelling pieces. I’m planning to print them out to use when we re-row this later down the road!