One of Bluey’s recurring missions is to help TRDad complete the grocery shopping. These trips happen several times a week at various local stores.
This may at first glance seem like not much of a big thing, but actually it’s an important part of Bluey’s homeschooling. Going to the grocery store on a regular basis from infancy has given Bluey a chance to work on a number of skills.
Our trips to the store are a constant conversation about which foods are better for you than others, or what foods go well together. Learning about nutrition will serve Bluey well in his future life.
Bluey has made many friends at the supermarket and stops to chat them up when we visit. He’s learned the importance of Please and Thank You at the grocery, as well as important social skills, like waiting for someone else to finish talking before you respond.
Lately we’ve been working on some new math skills while at the grocery. Produce shopping is a great place to learn math.
We started with simple counting practices: “Let’s get 4 of these apples… “.
But our favorite teaching tool has been the produce scale. We can see a number line in action with the scale. We learn about density and size and how they affect weight. Our lessons started out with Bluey wanting to weigh some tomatoes we picked out. First, he weighed them one at a time, but then he wanted to see what they weighed all together. He weighed bagged tomatoes and loose ones.
After he weighed a mango, he had a pepper of about the same size, but declared:
“I think this will weigh less than the mango.”
— ‘Why is that?’
“Because it’s hollow inside.”
Exactly. Bluey is learning everywhere we go! But we really love our lessons at the produce department. During the simple act of going grocery shopping, Bluey’s math skills get sharper each week, along with his knowledge of spatial relations, chemistry and so much more.