Caps for Sale
Last week we were going to take a break, but Before Five in a Row beckoned us. We had read through Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina during the previous week as part of our lesson on self-control, but the boys were enjoying the story so much I decided it need a good, honest “row.” This is one of Ian’s favorites, and we did almost everything in the B4FIAR manual, as well as a few extras.
Ian got silly with one of Arianna’s toys and tried to balance them like the peddler’s caps. (Pardon the not-so-charming scratch under his nose!)
I printed out a bunch of pages from Homeschool Creations. Many just went into Ian’s “workbook” (a collection of worksheets or activities that I slide into plastic sheet protectors and have him do with dry-erase markers so I can reuse them), but there were also a couple activities I left out on the table all week. One was a word sort with “-ap” and “-at” words. I planned to use it just with Ian, but Elijah asked me first and ended up doing really well sorting the words into the right columns.
Their favorite activity, however, was rolling the cube that had pictures of the different kinds of coins on it. In the story, the peddler calls out, “Fifty cents a cap!” It was a great tie-in for learning about money. My objective this week was for Ian to be able to identify a penny, nickel, dime, quarter, 50-cent piece, and dollar coin. This game definitely helped us accomlish that. We took turns rolling the cube, and then I had Ian fill in the graph to mark the results. He loved learning how to make an X using the corners, and when the game was over (when one of the coins had been rolled 10 times), we practiced reading the graph. We played this several times throughout the week because he enjoyed it so much.
(Yes, we do school in pajamas, diapers, and dalmation costumes. Don’t you?)
Along with that game, I collected a bunch of coins and just let the boys have fun playing with them. We talked about “heads” and “tails” and sorted them in different ways. Ian liked clinking them together and commented on how the different types of coins made different sounds, which I thought was a great observation. The money was a big hit, and I still haven’t managed to get it all put away because they keep getting it out!
Finally, in addition to a fun reading of the story on YouTube, we watched the Reading Rainbow episode “Three Hat Day,” featuring Caps for Sale as one of the books recommended at the end of the program. Ian really loves this show, so I let him watch any I can find that relate to what we’re learning about.