The Snowy Day

Today while showing my parents some pictures of the girls I realized that I never did a review of our last two weeks. So here we go. Two weeks ago we did The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. This book was taken from the Before Five in a Row that is for children ages 2 to 4 so I knew Sierra would be able to join. She loved every bit of it! Zoey did too. As if on cue, Monday morning we woke up to a snow covered world. We went out into our snow covered world and played and sledded and had fun until we were too cold to do anymore then we came home and had hot chocolate for the kids, tea for the grown ups.

We didn't end up starting the book of the week until Tuesday, but it sure did help to have all of Monday's memories with us as we started this adventure. Since this was a Before Five in a Row title the activities are much simpler and shorter. We discussed how Peter realizes that he is not old enough to play with the big boys in the snowball fight and how he handles that. Every time we read the book after that Sierra would say, "Not old enough" when we got to the page of the snowball fight. We discussed sharing memories. I told Zoey about the time it snowed in Florida when I was a girl. I remembered all I wanted was to see snow then one day my mom woke me up and had me look out the window. It was snowing! It was also very early in the morning. I remember being excited to see the snow but not being to happy about being woken up. Sounds like me now. I told her how my sisters and I scraped up all the snow we could from the car to make a very small snowman. I asked her if she could remember any snow story she wanted to tell me. She said, "No." Sometimes I get so much out of her and then other times, nothing. Oh well on to the next day.

Zoey reading the book to Sierra.

Zoey and Sierra loved art day. We had tissue paper cut into shapes, water color paints, and colored glue. They were the quietest they have ever been while working on their pictures. Sierra was very specific about wanting only circles. Zoey cut some of her own tissue paper and made a picture of a girl with a hat for her first picture. For her second picture she put layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of tissue paper and colored glue. She was really enjoying mixing the colored glue.

Also Sierra had to have her hair in braids like Zoey. I can't believe I was able to braid it.

We also looked at the stoplight in the book and used this as a jumping point to talk about street signs. We read a few books from the library about signs and Zoey wanted to make her own.

It says, "Caution, Watch for Children." She put it in the hall and when I walked down the hallway she would jump out and say, "Watch for children!" What a nut she is.

We also talked about different types of clothing and weather. By the end of the week the snow was almost gone. We got our new snow boots on and headed out. Sierra went down to our neighbor's tree-covered yard where there was more snow. She was walking around in it saying, "Tracks, tracks Mommy!" I asked her if she was making tracks in the snow like Peter in the book and she gave me a  big smile and said yes. I had planned on talking about making tracks in the snow but I forgot. Thanks to Sierra we still go it all done. She walked around and around for the longest time making tracks.

Both of the girls worked on making lapbooks for this story.  A lapbook is a file folder folded to open like a shutter in the front with different things glued inside. For Sierra this was her first lapbook. She was SO happy to use glue stick and "do school" like Zoey. She is so proud of it. She showed it to my mom and dad with big smiles on her face.

Last but not least we learned a new snow song this week. I used to sing this one all the time when I taught. It is sung to I'm a little teapot....

I'm a little snowman, short and fat
Here are my buttons, here is my hat
When the sun comes out I can't play
I just simply melt away.

By the way there is still snow piled up in places here or there. Crazy.

Who Owns the Sun?

The last week of school in December before I flew away to Florida we studied the book Who Owns the Sun by Stacy Chbosky. I was not sure if Zoey would be ready for the topic of this book or not. It is about slavery. This book was written by a 14-year-old girl, Stacy Chbosky. It is a simple book but very well written. I decided to go ahead with this story for the book of the week since the history lesson in it is very valuable and one that will continue to be built on throughout Zoey's schooling.

The week started off with the obvious discussion of slavery. I kept it as simple as I could and answered any questions Zoey had. She didn't have too many but she agreed that it was wrong. I found so many picture books at the library to go along with this theme that we are still reading some of them now, almost a month later. We also discussed family relationships, how we show people we care about them. Then we placed our story disk in south eastern US.

We learned new vocabulary words on the second day and learned about the question mark. Zoey now uses it from time to time when writing the words for the people in her drawings. Our last discussion for this day was poetic prose. I think it went over her head, it kind of did mine. lol

The next day was art. We looked at the pictures in the book and noted how the illustrator used watercolors. She used bright light and shadows to help with the emotion of the story. This led to a discussion of shadows and using them in our artwork. Now Zoey is noticing shadows everywhere! We painted with watercolors. Sierra joined in on the fun with this and both girls painted many, many pictures. Sierra always surprises me. She is very particular about her artwork. She doesn't just pile stuff on until the page is full. I have examples of this for my review of The Snow Day, which will be next.

For applied math we counted the stars on one page and the pickets in a fence on another. Zoey can count very well from 1 to 12 and 16 to 40 but 13, 14, and 15 are not always all there. Sierra can count to 12 and I haven't even been trying to teach her numbers.

The last day was science and we never got to this because I got busy packing. I am sure we will pick it up again at another time.

Now this has nothing to do with our school work but when we were at the library the girls got to decorate a gingerbread house together. Isn't it cute?

New curriculum

I decided tonight on a new curriculum. Every day the girls will watch the previous night's episode of Jeopardy over and over again until they have all of the questions (answers) memorized. Done. LOL I wish it were that easy. That wouldn't be any fun anyway. I couldn't decide if I wanted to start back to school this week or not so I set up a lesson plan for the week. Well it is Tuesday night and we have been so busy with other stuff that nothing has happened. I guess we will start back next week. We worked on school right up until the day before I flew to Florida so I guess this is just our second week off for winter break before we start a bunch of weeks with a winter and snowy theme. When I get a chance I will share what we did the last week before our break. Our book was Who Owns the Sun and we are still reading all of the great books to go along with it that I checked out from the library.  Zoey never ceases to amaze me at all the books she will listen to me read to her. That is a very good thing. And it seems Sierra is now memorizing the books I read to her. Off to bed with me, night all!

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.

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.

Dinosaurs and Volcanoes

Recently we spent two weeks exploring the world of dinosaurs and volcanoes. Zoey requested this so I really wanted to see what we could learn together. The curriculum Five in a Row that we are using this year does not have any lesson plans for dinosaurs or volcanoes so I was on my own with this one. I got a TON of books from the library and even a DVD for children about volcanoes. So our journey began.

We read book after book after book, fiction and non-fiction. Lately Zoey has been only wanting to hear stories and does not want anything to do with non-fiction but when it came to these subjects she was all ears, especially with the volcano books. There was an especially good book that was titled You Wouldn't Want to Live in Pompeii by John Malam. This combined telling a story but taught many things about volcanoes too. Here is a link to the book, Click here. 

Some other fun things we did were to make dinosaur fossils and dinosaur eggs which we later painted.

The girls were really concentrating when painting the dinosaur eggs and they came out pretty cute. We did the dinosaur and volcano unit for two weeks and Zoey is still asking for more books on the subjects. Guess she really knows what she wants to learn about.

Thanks as always for reading. I hope you enjoy sharing our adventures with us.

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World

I am behind on sharing our adventures with all of you but I am determined to catch up. So here we go..

A few weeks ago our book of the week was How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World written and illustrated by Marjorie Priceman. I decided when planning this week that I was going to keep it simple, only plan activities from the Five in a Row manual. I would not add any extra activities that I found on the Five in a Row message boards or plan a lapbook. Zoey and I are enjoying the lapbooks and extra activities but I thought we were ready for a week of simplicity. I was right.

We started off the week by finding all of the countries visited in the book to gather the ingredients for an apple pie. We found Italy, France (second time for France since we already found it in Madeline,) Sri Lanka, England, Jamaica, and also the state of Vermont. I had books for most of these places and as usual Zoey had no interest. That was until she saw me looking at them. We looked at all of the pictures and she wanted to know what they were all about. We also put story disks on the world map to mark all of the places the book took us. Our map is getting quite full. Especially since Sierra had to add to story disks to the map herself. That week Sierra was in love with the book Two Crazy Pigs and so I gave her two circles to color and she chose where to put them. Apparently the pigs in the book are from the Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is great that she wants to join in everything we do. It is also great that she takes a nap so Zoey and I can do things just the two of us. Or so Mommy can take a quick nap while catches up on a TV show.

Tuesday was a busy day. Before we read the story we went over some vocabulary words. I asked Zoey to listen for the words; ingredients, superb, locate, elegant, coax, persuade, native, and plantation. I told her the definitions for the words and we started reading the book. She was so excited every time she heard one of the words. She found almost all of them while we read. Going forward, she has used superb and elegant in her own speech. When we were done reading we looked through the book to find all the funny things we could find either in the pictures or in the words. The cow going skydiving was my favorite part. Zoey said her favorite part was everything. Sierra said, "going." I have no idea what she is referring to. The last thing we did was to pantomime the actions near the end of the story. We ground wheat into flour, milked the cow, churned butter, just to name a few.

Art day did not go as planned. I had planned to draw street scenes like in the book but Zoey wanted nothing to do with it. Oh well, no big deal. We did discuss the contrast in the colors used in the book but I think that went over her head. We did some subtraction with apples and then that led to playing games with the fruit manipulatives that we have.

On Friday we started off the day with a science experiment. We made salt water and we were supposed to leave it out for who knows how long to let the water evaporate and discover we only had salt left. Zoey did have fun sticking her finger in the water and writing on the sidewalk. We watched that water evaporate. Well we waited days and that water never went away so I poured it out. Later on Friday we went shopping to buy everything for the apple pie. I wanted to make it more fun so we pretended that we were going around the world while at the store to get all of our ingredients.  I started off by saying, "Oh no the market is closed." The book starts that way. Well, Sierra kept saying it too the whole time we were in the store "traveling the world." It was so funny. For days after that Sierra would say, "Oh no maket cosed" when we went to the store. Zoey completely and totally got into pretending to travel the world while at the store. She just said to me right now, "Remember when we went the store and pretended it was the world and then we came back home?" We didn't have time that day to make our pie so we did it on Monday. This was a good thing because my Mom was able to come over and help. We had a good time but I will say this. I am never making an apple pie again and THANK YOU to my Mom for helping. Ugh, pie crust!

The one thing that I did add into this week was salt sculptures. Mom got me some baby food jars and I had a container of salt I wanted used up. I gave Zoey sidewalk chalk and a bowl of salt and showed her how to color the salt. They came out really pretty. Zoey could wait to shake hers up. It took all I had in me to let her do it. Sierra woke up from nap and did one too. I wasn't sure if she would be able to do it or not but she did great.


The weather also was very nice this week. We had plenty of days to go outside and play. Zoey loves riding her new bike Poppy got for her and Sierra just loves to run and hop. The leaf color this week is the best this week and the girls continue to collect them. I even pulled the van over in a parking lot to pick some very bright red leaves. I hope you enjoyed this weeks review. Hopefully I will be caught up soon. Thanks for reading.