A Pair of Red Clogs

We were off to Japan for our adventure with A Pair of Red Clogs by Masako Matsuno.  This is a story about a grandmother who remembers when she was a young girl and got a new pair of red clogs. She was so proud of them until she got a crack in one of them. She then decides to trick her mother by getting them muddy so that she can get a new pair. She realized that it is not right to trick her mother and will never do it again. A Pair of Red Clogs is a very sweet story. It was nice too because the story was short enough that Sierra could sit and listen to the whole story.

We started off the week like we always do with a story disk and found Japan on the map. We learned what and island is and noticed how close Japan is to China. Zoey remembered China from when we did The Story about Ping.  We had a discussion about lying and dishonesty. Then we looked at the things in the book that were different than how we live. We found so many interesting things. Later, Zoey wore my bathrobe as a Kimono and bowed to me. I had to bow too. She put on her flip flops and said they were her clogs. She came up with that on her own. Once again anything that had to do with pretend Zoey loved.

We had vocabulary on Tuesday and since then Zoey has been using the word perfectly often. I told her to ask her Poppy about lacquer. It may not be the same kind but I am sure he could show her something similar. We also discussed what reminiscing is and how the author used that method of storytelling.

Next we noticed how all of the pages had yellow on them except where the grandmother is not talking about the past. We discussed how this unity made the story better.  Then we used some examples of stick figures in the Five in a Row book and compared them to the people in the story. We looked to see if we could find the people they were drawn from. I showed Zoey how you can start with a stick figure and add to it to make a whole person. She pretty much already does this so she didn't seem to care to much. lol

Counting clogs! We counted all of the clogs in the whole book. There were over 100 clogs! I had to help with this one since Zoey stalls out in the 40's right now,  48, 49, 40, 41, 42... 

We also started a weather chart this week. We are tracking the temperatures and weather conditions. We are a bit behind this right now. Maybe we can catch up today. Zoey wants snow so badly.

Over all this was a great week. Zoey is moving right along with her letters, numbers and other work too. Right now she likes dot to dots and mazes better than anything else. Sierra is just tagging along and loving coloring is Zoey's old workbooks.

I almost forgot, we also played store. We didn't shop for clogs though. We pretended grocery store and used play money. Both of the girls really got into this.

One idea in the manual was to eat a meal at sitting on pillows at a low table. Tonight we finally had a chance to do this. It went so well. Both of the girls ate much better than they usually do. I used a diaper box for the table with a pillow case for the table cloth. It went so well we may try this again. Thanks for reading.