Cranberry Thanksgiving
Like many other Five in a Row families, we spent last week (actually more like the last two) with Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin. Ian really enjoyed the story and requested it to be read to him over and over. For days he looked forward to making Grandmother’s cranberry bread, though he wasn’t too thrilled with the results. (I think the problem was that our cranberries were so big and tart, you got a huge bite of sourness without enough bread. He had opted for all cranberries instead of half raisins, so it was pretty intense. All the adults loved it, but next time I think we’ll use the raisins and maybe use sweetened dried cranberries or at least cut the fresh ones in half. )
We had a few of the discussions from the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1), but mostly we just learned about cranberry bogs and the story of Thanksgiving. We found Cranberries by Inez Snyder at the library and read it a few times. Ian really enjoyed watching How It’s Made: Cranberries on YouTube. (A few years later, we went back to watch that, and also really enjoyed How Does It Grow? Cranberry and its follow-up episode.) We also watched the Reading Rainbow episode “Summer.” As it described how the cranberries are harvested, it showed a picture of the air pockets inside the berries that cause them to float. To follow up on that, we read The Magic Schoolbus Ups and Downs: A Books About Floating and Sinking.
We spent quite a while talking about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. Last year at this time I was only a couple weeks away from delivering Arianna, so we didn’t do a whole lot, though I had collected a number of books and printed/ laminated some activities. This year it was so nice to pull out my Thanksgiving file and have all sorts of things to do! We enjoyed playing with Thanksgiving dominoes and memory cards from www.dltk-cards.com. We also did some activities from the Thanksgiving Preschool Packs at 1+1+1=1 and Homeschool Creations and Pilgrim maze.
Combined with the Thanksgiving Devotional we did during Bible Time each evening (see this post for more on that), a basket full of books both from our family collection and the library, and a couple Thanksgiving movies (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and William Bradford: The First Thanksgiving, both big hits that we watched over and over) I thought the boys got a pretty thorough Thanksgiving education!
To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.” Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.