The Rag Coat

This week or um, a few weeks ago our book of the week was The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills. Here is the School Library Journal's description of the book. Minna, a young Appalachian girl, wants very badly to attend school, but she doesn't have a coat. Her father has just died and her family cannot afford one. When a group of mothers who gather at her house regularly to make quilts hear of her predicament, they decide to help her. Minna is thrilled, but when the new coat is finished and she wears it to the one-room schoolhouse, she is teased by her classmates for wearing rags. Minna is hurt, but she eventually gains their interest when she explains that her coat is full of stories--their stories--for each scrap has come from one of their homes. The children are enthralled and sorry for their taunts. (I did that to save me some time.)

After reading the book with Zoey and discussing the different relationships in the story we found the Appalachian mountains on our world map and our USA map. I tell Zoey how we have been to these mountains and she remembered.

We expanded on the book's theme around quilts and read many, many stories about quilts. A special thank you goes out to Daddy here for reading many of these stories at night before bedtime. We also got out my box of leftover fabrics and cut out squares to make a baby doll quilt. Zoey choose all of the fabrics and decided what order to put them in. I gave her different suggestions of possible patterns but ultimately she came up with her own uniquely Zoey pattern. While I worked on sewing the quilt with the sewing machine, Zoey sewed for the first time with a needle and thread. I really didn't think it was going go too well but she really surprised me.  She made many mistakes that I had to fix but she didn't give up and was so thrilled when it was done. When she was stuffing the pillow with fiber fill Sierra woke up and had to have one too. At least it only took a few seconds on the sewing machine to make her a simple pillow that she could stuff. Now they are both thrilled!

I can't figure out how to flip this, sorry.

Of course, they both couldn't wait to glue the scraps of fabric too.

Zoey has done this with every sewing project I do. She stands by the table to collect anything I classify as garbage. This time Sierra is able to join in now that she can glue too.

On Art day we had a discussion about the viewpoint of the book on the page where the two children are sitting in the corner of the room looking scared. Why did the artist choose to make them look so small against the very large adults? We also discussed their facial expressions throughout the book. Were they happy, sad, angry? Then we got out the paints. We had also discussed how the colors of the book are warm colors and so I let Zoey paint with just a few colors to see how it maybe changed her mood or what she chose to paint. When Sierra woke up and saw paints out she couldn't wait to get in on this. I added more colors and they painted for a very long time. They did not like it when I made them stop so I could run to the grocery store.

For math day we explored our tangrams and looked at the shapes in quilt patterns. I should of done more with the tangrams but I just ran out of time. I had cut out the shapes for the quilt pattern Joseph's Coat of Many Colors, the pattern showed in the book, out of material. The girls put the pieces of fabric on the carpet and I showed them how to make the pattern. Zoey liked taking it apart and putting it back together by herself.

In the book, Minna's father was a coal miner so we also had a few books about about coal mining this week. Zoey was not very interested. I wasn't surprised. All of that changed when we became coal miners. I taped flashlights onto bicycle helmets and we pretended to be coal miners. There were cave ins but we all got out alive. This was by far Zoey and Sierra's favorite thing we did. They were especially thrilled when I let them do it again at night time and turn all the lights in the house off. Sierra had to use Mat's bicycle helmet so it kept sliding off. She didn't give up though. The pictures didn't come out too great because they were on the move the whole time.

The next day they wanted to play coal miners again at night time. They were so excited when I let them take their gear in the car when we went to go pick up the pizza for dinner. I would not let them have the flashlights on while I was driving but said they could have them on when I went in to get the pizza. I was watching the van from inside Papa Johns and all I could see was these two flashlights shining all over the inside of the van. I just had to laugh.

We had so many things to do this week spilled over into the next. It was worth taking two weeks to explore this book and it game me time to finish the quilt.

Thanks for sharing our adventure with us.