Category Archives: Preschool

Lent: Looking forward to New Life

Lent1Our family so enjoyed the sacredness of celebrating Advent that I decided I wanted to do something for Lent this year to make this season a holy celebration as well.  Usually when I think of Lent, I think “fasting,” but really the season is about so much more than that.  I’m not sure how much our children would understand the concept at their ages and whether they could really choose to give something up on their own.  I don’t want the season to be remembered for how much they resented me taking away their sweets or screen time. So instead, I’m choosing to use a “Lenten Tree” to represent God bringing us new life.

Throughout the season we will add leaves, flowers, and ornaments to transform our barren “tree” into a lush symbol of Christ’s triumph over death.  I’ll share a little more about how those things will get added as we move toward the celebration of the Resurrection.

To see how our tree came to life, check out The Resurrection: Letting Go of Expectations.

When I Was Young in the Mountains

Last week Five in a Row took us to Appalachia with When I was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant.  It’s a sweet story that sparked several questions from Ian and Elijah.  So in addition to the lessons we did from the Five in a Row (Vol.) 2 manual, we took a few rabbit trails, which led to lots of learning!

Every time we read the first page, about how the little girl’s grandfather would kiss her on the forehead because he was so dirty from working in the coal mines that only his lips were clean, Ian asked, “Why was he so dirty?”  Finally I went hunting for a video on coal mining.  The best thing I could find was an episode of the show Dirty Jobs, which was available to watch streaming on Amazon (free for Prime members).  Episode 30 features a segment about coal mining.  (PARENT ADVISORY: the first half of the episode is on a different job and contained some rough language.  It was really too bad, because I think my boys would both really enjoy this show, but with a few bad words thrown in occasionally, it’s just not suitable for children.  I did end up letting my boys watch the coal mining segment with me, but we talked about using pure words and not copying people who don’t. I know many parents would choose not to show it to their children, so definitely watch it first.  If you know of a better video to learn something about coal mining, please comment below!)

At one point in the story, the girl talks about hearing the call of a bobwhite.  The boys wondered what that was, and since I knew nothing beyond the fact that it was a bird, we did a little research together.  The boys enjoyed seeing pictures of bobwhites and especially listening to recordings of a bobwhite’s call.  After that, every time we read this part of the story, Ian would imitate the birdcall.

The children’s lives in this story are very different from ours in many ways.  After we had read through the story a few times, I had Ian point out differences.  We talked about how the girl was poor and yet she seemed very content with her life.  I wanted to find a video that brought the Appalachian world alive for the boys, so we watched the pilot episode from the old television series Christy.  It’s about a young woman who goes to teach in a one-room schoolhouse (which doubles as a church, like in When I Was Young in the Mountains) in a small community tucked back in the hills of Tennessee.  Elijah lost interest after a while, but Ian enjoyed watching it with me.

For our last activity, Ian wrote his own story in a style like Cynthia Rylant.  I asked him to share about things remembers from when we lived with Grandma and Grandpa in their house in the hills.  I typed out his memories and then he illustrated the first one.

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Such fun memories!

 

Truman’s Aunt Farm

Last week we had fun with Truman’s Aunt Farm by Jama Kim Rattigan.  It’s the story of a little boy who hopes to get ants for an ant farm for his birthday but ends up getting aunts instead.  It’s a cute story that easily lends itself to several lessons.  Ian especially liked it because a friend gave us an ant farm a while back, though our ants haven’t built any spectacular tunnels.  (I think it was older and the gel had hardened a little too much for the ants to dig easily.)  Still, our children have all enjoyed getting to observe the ants up close.

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We expanded on the activities in the Five in a Row (Vol. 3) manual a bit.  The most obvious lesson to go along with this book is teaching homophones, words that sound alike but have different meanings.  (The manual refers to them as homonyms, but I was taught that homonyms are also spelled the same, whereas homophones are spelled differently.  In trying to verify which term was correct, I looked both words up in several dictionaries.  Some agreed with my memory.  Others said either term could describe words spelled differently.  I chose to go with what I was taught.)

homophonesI introduced this concept before we even read the book for the first time, pointing out the spelling of “ant” and “aunt” so that Ian could understand the mix-up and why it made the story funny.  Afterword I went through a homophone worksheet with him, helping him choose the correct word for each situation.  Since we are just starting to work on spelling, it was a good introduction to the idea that two different spelling combinations can be used to make the same sounds.  Later that day we also watched several videos on YouTube that featured the idea of homophones: a segment from Between the Lions, “homophone monkey,” and a clip from VeggieTales.  As a follow up on another day we read The King Who Rained by Fred Gwynne.  (Other fun books that feature wordplay with homophones/homonyms are A Chocolate Moose for Dinner by Fred Gwynne, Dear Deer: A Book of Homophones by Gene Barretta, and How Much Can a Bare Bear Bear? by Brian P. Cleary.)

I decided this was also a good time to introduce letter writing.  I told Ian that Truman wrote to his aunt, but he could write to anyone he chose.  He immediately decided to write to his cousins.  I gave him a basic “form” to copy for writing a friendly letter and then let him write the body of it on his own.  His mind started thinking faster than he could write down the words, so he left out several letters.  I just wrote in the complete words above so his cousins would be able to read it, and then we put it in an envelope, addressed it together, put on a stamp and got it off in the mail.

Truman

This tied in with the lesson from the manual about stamps.  I chose to expand on that by showing the boys our family’s stamp collections.  (Both my husband and I were philatelists in our younger days.)  I’d forgotten how fascinating it could be looking through the pages of old stamps.  This hobby taught me so much about history as a child.  I wasn’t sure the boys would appreciate them yet, but they really enjoyed looking at the variety of stamps, especially several that were over a hundred years old.

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Finally we had fun singing “The Ants Go Marching.”  (I thought it was funny that Ian recognized the song as being a spoof on “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”  I remember thinking it was the other way around when I was a kid.)  There are several videos of the song on YouTube, but here was my favorite.  If we row this book again when my other kids are older, I think it would be fun to have the whole family help illustrate the song substituting “aunts” in the lyrics but that seemed overly ambitious this time around.

Another fun week with Five in a Row!

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.

Long Story Short: David and Goliath

David and Goliath

The two armies (and their champions) face off under Ian’s watchful eye.

It’s been a while since I posted anything about our journey through Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, but we had so much fun with David and Goliath recently that I thought I’d post about it.  There are lots of ideas floating around online for preschool lessons to go along with the story (like my previous post from the last time we covered it), but not so many for elementary age kids.  This time around I tried not to repeat everything we’d done before.  We did pull out some of our favorite activities (like painting a life-sized Goliath) though, while still adding a few new ones Ian wasn’t ready for before.  Our discussion was also a little deeper this time, since Long Story Short shows how every story points to Jesus.  Just as God used David to help Israel achieve a seemingly impossibly victory against an overpowering enemy, He also used Christ to conquer sin and death, something we could never accomplish on our own.  I love how the Lord used David’s experiences as a youth in the field (trusting the Lord to help him kill the lion and the bear) to prepare him for an event he never could have imagined.  We told the boys we never know how God might be preparing us for something in the future, and that even as children their faithfulness and trust in Him can help them be ready to be used in a might way.

The highlight of our week was definitely painting Goliath.  We measured out 9 feet on a role of paper and then I drew a basic outline for the kids to paint.  We took it outside and then I left them to their fun.

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We hung the completed painting in our living room and left it up for a couple weeks so anyone who came over could admire it.  I considered making “slings” like David’s, but I was afraid the boys would just get frustrated by how difficult it was to aim, so we stuck with just throwing rolled up socks at Goliath.

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Along with measuring Goliath’s height, we did another measurement activity that was suggested in Long Story Short.  The Bible says the head of Goliath’s spear weighed 600 shekels, or about 15 pounds (1 Samuel 17:7).  We piled books on a scale until we had a stack that weighed 15 pounds, and then I placed the stack in Ian’s arms so he could feel how heavy just the head of Goliath’s spear had been.  Ian could hardly hold it long enough to take a picture, and we talked about how strong Goliath must have been to carry such a heavy weapon.

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Another new thing we did was print out and color two little books (“David, The Lion, and the Bear” and “David is Brave”) from Lambsongs(Search the page to find the titles.)  They were easy enough for Ian to read, and he really enjoyed coloring them in and having his own books.  (They print two on a page, so Elijah also got a copy, though he didn’t have the attention span to finish his coloring.)    Goliath5

The boys loved our “Listening Lesson” for this story and requested it frequently, even wanting to sing the songs to Daddy at night during Bible time.  Here’s what was on our iPod playlist:

It can be challenging to find ways to keep our Bible lessons “fresh” when covering such familiar stories, but I think overall we had a successful week.  Ian’s already asking me about the next time we do this story and sharing his plans for painting another Goliath.

Owl Moon

We recently spent a little over a week rowing Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.  This was another one of those books unknown to me before Five in a Row (FIAR) introduced us.  All my kids seem to have a fascination with owls, so we enjoyed our time with this book.  The main character is a brave child (probably a girl, but it’s never stated, and Ian preferred to think it was a boy), and the discussion of bravery fit in well with our current Bible story of David and Goliath (post coming soon).

We did several of the activities in the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 2).  I briefly discussed the Caldecott award with Ian, pointing out the “medal” on the front cover, and ever since he has been calling my attention to other books he find in our library that were awarded either the gold Caldecott medal or the silver Caldecott honor.  When we talked about similes, I first read Ian Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood to help him understand the concept.  He wasn’t able to pick them out of Owl Moon by himself, but he was starting to understand when I pointed them out.  It was a good introduction anyway.

We also spent time on a few additional activities:

Literacy

I haven’t worked with Ian a lot on spelling because I don’t want it to be something separate from the rest of what we’re learning.  However I do like to try incorporating spelling lessons into other things we’re working on.  ow wordsThis seemed like a good opportunity to talk about the short “ow” sound (as in “owl”).  I found a couple fun videos about the sound (one from the old TV show Electric Company on YouTube, and one from FirstStepReading.com) that had both boys giggling and reading along. Then Ian did a “word sort” of words spelled ow/ou from All Sorts of Sorts by Sheron Brown.  (When we do these, I have him sort the words independently and then I check them before he glues them down.  After that’s done I have him read through all the words.)

Science

After spending the first part of the year using Exploring Creation With Astronomy, Ian enjoyed learning more about the phases of the moon.  We enjoyed a visual simulation that helped demonstrate what causes the moon to look the Owl4way it does.  Then everyone enjoyed using Joe-Joes (like Oreos) to show the different phases using a guide I’d found back when we rowed Goodnight Moon.  I had planned on using a free set of phases of the moon cards, but I didn’t get them made ahead of time so it never happened.  Neither did the “mystery moons” activity I had thought sounded fun.  Oh well, maybe next time!

As I mentioned before, all my kids are intrigued by owls, so I wanted to spend some time studying them more in depth.  We found a National Geographic special called “The Silent Hunters” on YouTube.  Gail Gibbons’ book Owls is full of beautiful pictures and great information, like the two families of owls: typical owls (Strigidae) and barn owls (Tytonidae).  That knowledge helped our understanding when we had a family movie night watching Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.  (We really enjoyed the movie.  I hope to read through the Guardians of Ga’hoole book series by Kathryn Lasky as well at some point.)  We talked about what (and how) owls eat and dissected owl pellets. (I bought a Young Scientists kit that contained other activities we can do another time.)  Elijah wasn’t so sure about it at first, but eventually he was fascinated enough to want his own turn studying the bones we found.  If you’re not up to the real thing, there’s a “virtual dissection” available online at KidWings.

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owl5Extras

We had a great time with Owl Moon.  One day we watched the story on DVD in the Scholastic Storybook Treasures (Collection 2).  We also enjoyed the story Owl Babies by Martin Waddell (both the book and a video on YouTube).  Ian’s been really into drawing, so I took him through the steps of “How to Draw an Owl” from Art Projects for Kids.  All in all, I’d say it was a successful row!  The day I was finishing this post, we went to a local children’s museum, and in the room with all kinds of wild animals (a tribute to taxidermy) Ian was quick to find an owl.  “Hey!  We studied that!”  Why, yes, we did.

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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.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

While the “polar vortex” froze most of the country, here in southern California we were relying on our imaginations and immersing ourselves in snowy stories to feel like it was truly winter.  Our first Five in a Row book of 2014 was Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, a picture book of the poem by Robert Frost illustrated by Susan Jeffers. (The most recent edition has updated illustrations, but we have the original version, pictured above.)  It’s a lighter unit than most of rows (intended as a review week), so it was the perfect choice to ease our way back into school.  We did a few of the lessons from the FIAR (Vol. 1) manual, as well as a number of activities about snowflakes and crystals.  We also watched several videos related to snow, including Bill Nye the Science Guy (both Earth’s Seasons and Climates) and Reading Rainbow: Snowy Day Poems

We read two books that went along well with our “snowflake” theme.  The first, The Tiny Snowflake by Art Ginolfi was one I came across as I was looking for Christmas book suggestions, but since it had nothing to do with Christ’s birth, I decided to save it for January, and this was the perfect time to pull it out.  It’s about a little snowflake who learns that God made all snowflakes unique.  We have the board book format, and Arianna has asked for the story repeatedly, so it was fun to be able to include her in our school time.  This book also prompted our morning Bible reading.  I loved reading through Psalm 139 with Ian every day throughout the week and talking about what it means to be “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

We also read Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin (which we will hopefully cover in more depth someday using FIAR Vol. 4).  It tells the story of William Bentley, who is famous for his work photographing snowflakes.  You can find many of his photographs online, and we enjoyed looking at the variety of the snow crystals.  After seeing how amazing real snowflakes are, we decided to make some of our own.

The boys really enjoyed making paper snowflakes.  We used coffee filters, which made it easy to get to the fun part.  I love that even the simple cuts the Elijah was able to do made beautiful art.  They had a lot of fun playing with them and watching them float through the air.  Then we hung them on the kids’ bedroom windows for a winter decoration.

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Making the snowflakes led to a discussion of how crystals have six sides.  I got out my geode collection and let the kids examine the crystals, which fascinated them.

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Finally, we made our own “crystal snowflakes” using pipe cleaners and borax solution.  I wasn’t very good at following the directions because I wanted to make a whole bunch at one time.  So I didn’t measure either the water or the borax; as it dissolved I just kept adding more powder, vaguely recalling something from high school chemistry about making a super-saturated solution.

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Evidently that wasn’t quite what we were going for, because our crystals looked like they were on steroids compared to all the pictures I’ve seen from people who’ve done this activity.  Luckily it still worked, and the kids were thrilled with how they turned out.

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(We also had a lovely crystal garden on the bottom of the pan which broke into pieces as I tried to get it out of the pan, and the kids thought the chunks were wonderful treasures to share with their friends.)

Last but not least, we ate snowflakes made from tortillas.  I preheated the oven to 400, warmed up the tortillas in the microwave so they would fold easily, cut the patterns, sprayed both sides with coconut oil and popped them in the oven for 5 minutes.  (The kids were all occupied and I wanted to surprise them.  They’d had a hard enough time cutting the paper, I didn’t feel it necessary to include them in this step.)  Then I sprinkled them with powdered sugar and they were quickly devoured!

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All in all it was a great week of playing with snow!  Since we live in a place where we never get the real thing, we’ve had to make a special effort to expose our kids to it.  In the past we’ve taken a day trip up into the mountains for some snow play.  This year it’s been so warm I doubt there’s much up there, so books and movies are the only way we’re going to have any snow fun.  If you’re in the same boat and looking for more fun ideas to go along with snowy stories, check out my posts on The Snowy Day, Katy and the Big Snow, and Very Last First Time.

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.

Battling “the Wants” by Focusing on Advent

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Growing up I always felt like Christmas was a magical time, and as an adult I strove to recreate that feeling to no avail.  What I finally realized this year was that the feeling I felt as a child was almost entirely about the Christmas morning gift orgy.  Our one Christ-related tradition was attending Mass at my father’s church on Christmas Eve (the one time of year we ever went), and for me even that was about presents, since I was allowed to open one gift that night if I behaved well in church.  I saw that hour as a trial I had to endure to reach my goal of presents.  My childhood mindset was:

 Christmas = Present Day.

Can anyone relate?

This was the first in many years that I was again overwhelmed with a sense of wonder.  I think the main difference was that we chose to focus on Advent rather than Christmas.  As a child, the only thing I knew about Advent was that my aunt sent us an “Advent calendar” every year, which for me was essentially a countdown until Present Day.  I opened each door with increasing anticipation, knowing I was one day closer to the bliss of satisfying my rather serious case of ” the wants.”

Very little of our celebration this year was about presents on December 25th.  Instead we used the 4 weeks prior to Christmas to celebrate the turning point of human history.  We immersed our family in the story of Christ’s birth, beginning with the promise God made back in Genesis 3:15 about Eve’s seed bruising the head of the serpent.  We talked about blessing others and showing love, just as God showed us His love by sending Jesus.  Our whole family went caroling in two retirement homes and spent time just chatting with several residents afterward.  We had fun making spice dough ornaments and candy cane reindeer and giving them away to special friends and relatives.  We talked about various Christmas traditions and how they point us toward God and remind us of the Christmas story.

Our nightly family “Bible Time” around the Advent wreath became everyone’s favorite part of each day.  The boys took turns helping light the appropriate candles and blowing them out after we sang together.  Ian’s favorite song this season was “O Come O Come Emmanuel and he requested it every night, even when it wasn’t the song suggested in our devotional book (We Light The Candles by Catharine Brandt).  On Christmas Eve after the candlelight service at church, our extended family joined us for dinner and our final night with the Advent wreath.  The boys were so excited about finally lighting the Christ candle in the middle!  We read Song of the Stars by Sally Lloyd-Jones, which portrays the excitement of all Creation at the wonder that “the one who made us has come to live with us.”  The angel choir proclaims, “It’s time!  He’s come!  At last!  He’s here!”  It’s a wonderful book that captures the essence of Christmas as the climax of Advent, and it was the perfect way to end our season.

The result of all of this celebration is that we spent very little time talking about gifts.  Last year Ian was constantly poring through the numerous catalogs that kept arriving in the mail, which really captured his heart and caused him to focus on his “wants.”  I was so tired of hearing “I want ___,” “Can we get ___ sometime?” and so on that I finally threw all the catalogs away.  This year when they started arriving months ago I looked through them on my own for gift ideas and then got them out of the house.  I bought most of our gifts months in advance so I too would be able to focus on the wonder of Christ’s Incarnation rather than Present Day.  I know some people like to wrap up everything from toothbrushes to socks to make Christmas morning a little more exciting, but I felt that was counter to what we were trying to accomplish.  So I didn’t stuff stockings with everyday items I would have bought for my kids anyway, because that felt like it would make Christmas morning all about unwrapping presents.  (We did plenty of gift opening, but it almost felt like an addendum to a wonderful season of celebration, rather than being the main event.)  At our cousins’ house we read the Christmas story from Luke 2 before having our meal and progressing to gift-opening.  There was just so much more to Christmas than Present Day!

My dad’s birthday is on the 25th, so as we were about to dive into our breakfast someone asked if we were going to sing happy birthday.  My dad pretended to look surprised and said, “Whose birthday is it?  Jesus’?  Well, did you sing happy birthday to Jesus?”  To which Elijah promptly answered very seriously, “Yes, we did,” remembering the “Happy Birthday, Jesus” party with our homeschool group two weeks ago.  It had been just one more part of our month-long celebration, and I loved that Elijah knew it was all connected.

All in all, we had a wonderful Advent and Christmas.  I am so thankful that my children were able to enjoy the true wonder of the season by setting aside their “wants” and marveling in the miracle of Christ’s birth.  I’m already full of ideas for next year, and I hope we can continue to make Advent a meaningful part of our family tradition.

 

 

 

Our Advent Beginnings

For last two Christmases we were not living in our own home, so our opportunity to start establishing our own family traditions for the Advent season was limited.  Now that we have our own home and the boys are old enough to understand what’s going on, we want to make sure that we try to keep the season as Christ-centered as possible.  There’s at least one Nativity scene in every room of our house, and the schoolroom has the small tree with all the ornaments we made doing Truth in the Tinsel last year.  (The boys were disappointed that we weren’t making all new ones this year, but I promised them that I have other ornament-making plans in the works!)  Each day we read a section in The ADVENTure of Christmas by Lisa Whelchel, learning about various Christmas traditions and how they point to Jesus.  The kids take turns opening the doors on our wooden Advent calendar or unwrapping Christmas books (See Christmas Book Countdown).  Ian and I are also reading through the parts of the Christmas story in Luke and Matthew as we start school each day, and carols are frequently playing on the iPod as we go about our day.

P1020218My favorite new tradition, however, is our Advent wreath.  I’d heard about them before, but I had never had one in my home.  I’m not sure what prompted me to buy one this year, but even just a few days into the season I can already tell it’s one of the best Christmas purchases I’ve ever made.  Each night when we do “Bible Time” we light the appropriate candle as Eric leads us in a devotion from We Light The Candles, including a Bible passage, an explanation, a prayer, and (my favorite) a suggested carol to sing.  (I’ve been very intentional about playing these specific carols during the day so they’re familiar enough for everyone to sing along in the evenings.) The boys have been caught up in the beauty of our family sitting together with only the light of the candle and our Christmas tree, reading from the Bible and singing together.  Their prayers as we close are even different than usually, full of wonder and awe.

I don’t know whether we’ll use the same devotions in years to come or look for something new, but I know that our Advent wreath is here to stay.  It has already made the season feel extra special this year, and we’re all looking forward to the weeks to come.

(You can read more about what we did for Advent last year in “My *plans* for Advent.”)

The Duchess Bakes a Cake

The last thing we did for school before Nicholas was born (over a month ago already!) was to row The Duchess Bakes a Cake from Five in a Row Vol. 3.  It is such a fun book!  This is another one of those wonderful stories I’d never had the pleasure of reading before discovering Five in a Row.  We  loved the rhythm, the rhymes, the medieval setting, and of course the fun story.  There’s something special about a book that leads your 3-year old to request some “lovely, light, luscious, delectable cake” for dessert.  (We made an angel food cake to enjoy along with our “row” all week.)

Aside from doing a number of lessons in the FIAR Vol. 3 manual (talking about alliteration, doing the action drawing tracings, and watching the chemical reaction of baking soda and vinegar were among our favorites), we spent a couple weeks enjoying anything we could find related to medieval times.  We revisited many of the activities, songs, poems, books, etc. that I had collected when we did our unit on Knights, Castles, and the Armor of God.  (I won’t waste time relisting them again, but check out that post because we had a lot of fun both times!)  Our Bible verse for the week was “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.  Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.” Ephesians 6:10-11.  Mama was extremely pregnant during this row, so the children got to watch a lot more videos than I’d normally allow, including the old Disney cartoon Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Bob the Builder – The Knights of Fix-a-Lot (available on Netflix and streaming free for Amazon Prime members), and Disney’s The Sword in the Stone.  We recently came across a reference to King Arthur and the round table so I enjoyed introducing Ian to the Arthur legend.

We just managed to get all the knight books back on the shelf, our armor back in the dress-up box, and our castle put back in its storage tub before Nicholas made his appearance a bit earlier than expected.  Adjusting to having four kids age five and under has gone more smoothly than I anticipated, and we’re back into our regular school routine much sooner than I had that we’d be able to handle, so I’m looking forward to getting back to blogging more regularly!

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.

All Those Secrets of the World

I keep thinking I’m going to relax our school schedule a bit as we head into the final weeks before our baby arrives, mostly by taking a break from Five in a Row, but I just haven’t been able to do it.  We already do way more “school” than necessary because I’m pretty much adding FIAR to an already complete program.  The stories are just so great I can’t resist.  We mostly row from the manual without a lot of extras, which is really all anyone needs to do anyway.

Last week we discovered a charming book, All Those Secrets of the World by Jane Yolen, from Five in a Row (Vol. 2).  Each day we read the book and did a simple lesson from the manual.  We talked a lot about perspective and how objects that are far away look small.  (For a great lesson on this, check out “How Tall is it Really?” from Living and Learning at Home.)  For our weekly art lesson, we painted pictures demonstrating this using watercolors, like most of the illustrations in the book.  I demonstrated by painting a small tree up near the horizon of my picture and then a big tree on the other side of the paper.  Ian liked the idea of making something look farther away and decided to do an ocean scene like the pictures in the book.  However, after painting a small sailboat in the background and a large pirate ship in the foreground he got so into the details of the sharks surrounding the latter, the ship itself almost got lost.  Still, he understood the concept, and he had a lot of fun doing the painting, so I considered it a great success.

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(I’m so thankful the artist explained the details of the picture to me because I was somewhat at a loss as to interpreting it on my own!)

In the book Janie and her cousin aren’t supposed to swim in the water of the Chesapeake Bay because there’s a lot of oil.  We talked about how oil and water don’t mix and watched a toy similar to this one.  I found a list with some fun activities to explore this concept some more, but we didn’t get to any of them.  We also talked about the effects of an oil spill in the ocean.  He really liked this clip on YouTube about the Gulf oil spill.  (We had to watch it several times.)  I was hoping to find a way to watch the Go, Diego, Go episode “Ocean Animal Rescuer” which also discusses oil spills, but that season’s not streaming for free right now and I didn’t really want to purchase it without having previewed it.

So it was a pretty simple “row” but we had a great time with All Those Secrets of the World!

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.

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