His Treasure Seekers

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.

Such fun memories!

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.

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.)

I 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.

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.

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.

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.  This 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 way 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.

Extras

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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!