The Salamander Room

The first week of school! There were some bumps and snags, but it went pretty well overall. Although I don't think it will always be the case, this week Z-Man joined in on Little Man's Five in a Row studies. We started with a book Little Man requested, The Salamander Room. I so love this book about a boy who wants to transform his bedroom into a forest to accommodate a little salamander.

We learned about the food web and started coloring this poster. We'll leave it out on the desk and continue to work on it.

We read a great book on animal classification (taxonomy) What is the Animal Kingdom by Bobbie Kalman

  

and watched a very entertaining video from Moody Video called The Name Game:

Then we tried our hand at classifying LOTS of animals. Little Man loved this!

These animal cards were FREE printables at Homeschool Creations!

Little Man was inspired to create a Salamander Room in his bedroom. Z-Man came through with the necessary "moss" for the salamander's pillow by plucking the stuffing out of a couch cushion that I've been meaning to mend. 

We'll read one more book, One Rainy Night, about a boy and his mom collecting creatures for their nature center. 

And that will wrap up our first week! 

The Underground Railroad

We had a great week studying the Underground Railroad. Among the books we read were:

  
Wanted Dead or Alive: The True Story of Harriet Tubman
  
Follow the Drinking Gourd (with great FIAR lessons!)

  
Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt

  
The Drinking Gourd


That last one isn't the kind of book I would normally choose to read to my kids. In it, the child lies and his father, a deacon in the church(!) tells him that he's done a good job. I decided to go ahead and read it to see if they could spot "the end justifies the means" thinking and I was thankful that they could and that we could discuss it, since that thinking is so prevalent in our society today.


We listened to Follow the Drinking Gourd performed and explained.
We also listened to some great negro spirituals:
Go Down Moses, sung by Louis Armstrong, and
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, belted out by Etta James


And, of course, we looked up at the night sky to find the Big Dipper (the drinking gourd) and the North Star!


At the end of our week, we made the trek to Auburn, NY. It was well worth the drive! 

We visited the Harriet Tubman home and visitor center and received a great personal tour. Our tour guide was wonderfully knowledgeable and so passionate about her subject. Her enthusiasm was contagious.

We were also able to visit the Seward House, which was fascinating. Oh my. This family saved everything. I can't begin to tell you. They even saved the blood-stained, knife-slashed sheet from the assassination attempt on William Seward on the same night that Abraham Lincoln was shot. I SO wish I had been allowed to take pictures inside. The library was amazing! And the paintings! I'm so glad we went.

We crammed a lot into our day in Auburn but this post is getting quite long so I will wait to tell you about the Chapel completely decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany but, rest assured, it was stunning!

Our Week with Ping

Ping holds a special place in my heart because this Five in a Row unit was the very first thing that Z-Man and I ever did in the way of "official" homeschooling. This week, I was so happy to re-visit it with Little Man!

Some of the things we did:

• Found China on our huge, shower curtain map from Target. That was a great purchase.
• Read about China in our atlas and found the Yangtze River.

• Tried our own colored pencil sunsets, using one of the pictures in the book as a guide.

• Read the book, Ducks by Gail Gibbons and learned about different types of ducks.
• Learned how preening makes the duck's feathers waterproof and did an experiment where we tried to mix oil and water.

• Read the book, Floating and Sinking by Franklyn Branley, and did our own buoyancy experiments, using this chart from Homeschoolshare.com. We discussed what a hypothesis is and I taught Z-Man, who couldn't resist tagging along, how to calculate percentages.

All in all, a great week of fun and learning!

Mrs. Katz and the Passover

Last week, we learned all about Passover with a sweet Five in a Row book, Mrs. Katz and Tush. In the book, an elderly Jewish lady is befriended by a neighbor family and eventually adopted as their "Bubee." She tells the boy the story of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt as they share the Passover Seder together.

We covered many of the FIAR lessons, including:

• "Love your neighbor as yourself." - we memorized Luke 10:27 and used it as copywork and cursive practice.
• We read the story of the Exodus and made really cute (I know that just seems wrong, but they really are cute) little books of the 10 plagues that I found at Homeschoolshare.com
• A yeast experiment - mix yeast and sugar in a bottle of warm water and put a balloon over the top. That worked so well that we had to secure our balloon with electrical tape.
• We talked about patterns, tried drawing our own and looked at these National Geographic patterns in nature.
• We learned all about Passover with The Matzah That Papa Brought Home.
• We learned about Warsaw, Poland during WWII and why Mrs. Katz left in The Cats in Krasinski Square.
• We learned quite a few yiddish words, ate bagels and attempted to polka. :)

I like to have a picture of the books to show you. However, Amazon apparently no longer supports just the picture of the books without the purchase information. I am not trying to sell anything here. Of course, I'm not against anyone using these links, because I will get a commission, but that isn't my reason for putting them there.

Simple Machines

As part of our Iditarod-inspired arctic study, we read the FIAR book Very Last First Time, about an Inuit girl who is finally old enough to gather mussels under the sea ice at low tide - all by herself. Little Man was nervous when she wandered too far and the tide started coming in, but it turned out alright.

There are so many great lessons in this book:

• crisis thinking and what to do in an emergency
• tides
• Inuit culture
• maturity and having to wait for things
• handling fear
• inuksuks
• and simple machines.

At the end of our time with this book, we did a mini-unit on simple machines. We used the book, Experiments with Simple Machines, which had some fun and very simple activities using mostly things we had around the house.

We also watched a Bill Nye video on simple machines and found an online game here.

And finally did some experimenting with Little Man's gear set.

Snow!

We've just finished our mini-study of snow. It all started with our FIAR lessons on Katy and the Big Snow.

We were so excited to find, in our plethora of small vehicles, a bright red snowplow! Little Man used it to clear the roads on his town mat:

We moved on to Snowflake Bentley, a book we just love, and we found a wonderful video at the library that intersperses illustrations from the book with actual pictures of Wilson Bentley, his home in Vermont AND lots of pictures of his actual photos of snowflakes! It was a gem and definitely worth looking for.

As it happened, there were several perfect snowfalls during this time. We could actually hold a black glove out our kitchen window and capture snowflakes to examine with the magnifying glass. Later, they actually landed on the window and didn't melt so it was even easier to look at them.

We learned all about the different types of snow in The Story of Snow:

and Little Man practiced making hexagons on his geoboard.

Next we made some gorgeous paper snowflakes.

We just had to read this beautifully illustrated version of Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening:

which led us to look at some other wintery poems by Mr. Frost. Z-Man memorized this one, which he also used for copywork:

Dust of Snow

by Robert Frost

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Tonight after dinner, we attempted to make edible snowflakes. I steamed flour tortillas until they were soft and then folded them up and cut the into, well, sort-of snowflake shapes. Then we fried them in oil and sprinkled them with cinnamon sugar - mmmmm. They were delicious but sort of brownish. I guess plain powdered sugar would have been a more aesthetically pleasing choice.

And that wraps it up! Next week, we'll be doing all things Iditarod. The race starts on March 5 and if you've never followed it, you just don't know what you're missing. We initially started following it four years ago because we thought it would be a great learning opportunity. Now we are officially hooked. I'll keep you posted!

Lighthouses and Bridges

What a wonderful week we've had with The Little Red Lighthouse and The Great Gray Bridge.

We LOVE this book! I know, I say that about all the FIAR books, don't I? There are a few we haven't read so I may yet find one I don't like. I doubt it though.

I realize that, based on my last few posts, some readers might think all we do is run around outside. Fall is beautiful here and we try to get out in it as much as possible. Believe me, where we live there will be PLENTY of time to hole up in our cozy house for days on end. We DO stay home and do our work most of the time, though. (Wait, "most of the time" would be more than 50%, right? Like, 51% of the time? OK. Just wanted make sure I was telling the truth.)

We talked about lighthouses and the boys remembered all the lighthouses we saw on our trip to Maine:

We read Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie, another book we love, based on the true story of a young girl who has to take care of her whole family AND two lighthouses during a terrible storm.

We drew lighthouses too:

We talked about bridges and read The Bridge Book by Polly Carter, an entertaining summary of bridge building throughout history. It had some really good "boy" stories like the Roman soldier who single-handedly held off an entire army on a narrow bridge until the bridge could be destroyed behind him.

This book is based on the true story of P.T. Barnum and how he proved to doubters and naysayers that the Brooklyn Bridge really was safe to travel:

We made bridges:

and then lots of little boats to go under the bridges, and then diving boards and slides into the water...

Speaking of boats, one of the FIAR lessons is about boats and I found such a fun way to learn the names of a lot of different boats. There are little boat cards to print out at homeschoolshare.com and, if you print out two copies, you can play Go Fish! As in, "Do you have a chinese junk? No, go fish. Do you have a catamaran?" Good homeschooling fun.

Here's THE PERFECT poem by Christina Rosetti that ties in boats, bridges AND our previous weather study. I love it when things come together!

Boats sail on the rivers,

And ships sail on the seas;

But clouds that sail across the sky

Are prettier far than these.

There are bridges on the rivers,

As pretty as you please;

But the bow that bridges heaven,

And overtops the trees,

And builds a road from earth to sky,

Is prettier far than these.

Oh, and here are some really cool bridge videos: http://www.kinderpedia.com/bridge.asp

and a build-a-bridge game: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bridge/build.html

We ended our week with this absolutely gorgeous book about New York City that made us all want to jump in the van for a field trip:

Next, we'll be expanding on the lighthouse theme with a mini unit study on light! More on that as soon as I find time to post!