Simple Tips

March 26, 2007 | Print

Blueberries for Sal in your own backyard

Blueberries for Sal is one of our favorite books.

Sal and her mom collect blueberries in their tin pails and get all mixed up with a mother bear and her cub on blueberry hill. Sal is safe running all over the hill, the bears are friendly and at the end, mom and Sal go home and can blueberries for next winter.

Makes you want to live in the 1950s, or whenever women knew how to can blueberries and enjoyed it as much as Sal’s mom.

Though we may yearn for the past, toddlers and preschoolers love collecting anything in a pail, or Tupperware, or their pockets. The backyard can be their own blueberry hill. Leaves, sticks, flowers, a blade of grass, whatever inspires them.

They test what fits in the pail and what doesn’t. If they find a bush with mysterious berries, they may want to make their own berry pie.

If the kids are still interested after collecting, we put Elmer’s glue on construction paper so they can make a collage of their findings.

When the glue dries, they like to pull everything off the paper. And we learn that life is about the process, not the product.

Materials:
The outdoors
Bucket, container or tin pail
Elmer’s Glue
Construction paper
Blueberries for Sal

Age: Toddlers and Preschoolers

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