We read the book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett, and we enjoyed a week of activities surrounding the book (about weather, nutrition, and conservation) throughout a lot of subject areas. We even made a lapbook! We were able to get the lessons and lapbook for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs components free on Homeschool Share.
Here is a brief pictoral overview of the things we did last week with that unit (peppered in with some of our more traditional lessons as well)…
1. Building a house out of stale bread and peanut butter, just like they did in the book.
2. After a lot of discussion of who might eat the stale bread house (the kids said, “I think Papa would like it), we instead covered it with some bird seed (since we were filling the bird feeder) and left it outside.
This also gave us the opportunity to watch a squirrel for 45 minutes as he was both scared of the bread house and desperately wanting to eat it. It was like family entertainment!
3. We checked out the weather report. It was great to have the kids noticing all the words we had been reading about in the non-fiction weather books we had checked out from the library.
4. Cutting out compound words from a book in our lapbooks. Noah took a little extra time in cutting them out, as he declared that he was making a robot with the shapes. See it?
6. We had talked about where food comes from and good nutrition. So, we visited a local Farmer’s Market. We were excited to get to take Dad along with us, and it was his first time visiting the Farmer’s Market.
7. A wooden bowl full of grape tomatoes at the Farmer’s Market. We have yummy grape tomatoes in our own home garden, so we didn’t buy any, but they sure did look beautiful!
8. The kids had a great time looking at a picture board that a woman had that told all about their small farm. She was happy to chat with them all about her farm, the things they grew, the animals they had, and answered some questions they had.
9. More pretty produce at the Farmer’s Market.
10. The kids had a blast playing a nutrition game on a government website about good nutrition. It was a tricky game for the kids, because you not only have to eat well on the game, but you must make sure that you have breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack, as well as getting enough exercise, and being careful not to eat too many calories. If you did it all, your spaceship made it to Planet Power! Super fun!
11. After we had talked about the food pyramid, my picky kids (plus Molly, who is actually not picky) wanted to make sure that they had something from all the food groups at lunch. So, we made peanut butter and (homemade) strawberry jam sandwiches, carrot matchsticks, sugar free chocolate pudding (with just a little bit of Reddi Whip and sprinkles!), and a little bit of kettle corn that we had bought at the Farmer’s Market.
12. Working on spelling words that I wrote up based on the book.
13. Writing definitions for one of the elements of our lapbook. We got some practice with looking up things in a dictionary and writing very short definitions (to make sure they fit in the space provided).
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Angie can be found writing at her blog, Many Little Blessings, and dreaming up which unit plan she and the kids are going to tackle next.
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My older kids loved this book. What a creative way to learn so much from it!
How fun! I love the pictures…and I love those lunch trays! We have some very similar to that. Who says that hs’ed kids have to miss out on the “public school” experience? We can put our lunch on little sectioned trays, too! lol
LOL Kris!!! I like the trays because they are a great way to make sure the kids try a few different things at every meal. Funny thing is — when they were in public school, they never used the lunch trays because they always took their own lunch. So, apparently they have to stay home to use lunch trays. ;)
This looks like so much fun. I will be checking out this book.
Kelly
What Fun!! We’ve read this book before but I think we’ll have lots more ideas to put with it the next time…we, too, played Planet Power when we studied the Food Pyramid last year…my son had a “blast” :) I also loved that they could even print out a certificate…great addition to our “yearbook”. Thanks for sharing!
That looks great, we’ll definitely have to do this one!
BTW, when and where is the farmer’s market??
Great pictures! I’m getting more ideas on how to make reading a book more fun! Great TT idea! Have a great evening!
Looks like you all had a lot of fun. It reminded me that I need to check this book out as I loved it when I was kid. But I don’t think our kids have ever read it!
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