His Treasure Seekers

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.

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.

(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.

We recently spent a week with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic poem Paul Revere’s Ride in a book illustrated by Ted Rand.  It’s one of the Five in a Row titles I’ve been saving until Ian was a little older, but it fit in with our artist study (a portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley) so I decided to give it a shot.  We immersed ourselves in the early days of the American Revolution, and while we didn’t do a whole lot of activities outside of the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 3), I did come across several audio and video resources that I thought I’d share. Audio:

• Ian enjoyed the drama of a radio show called “Listen My Children” from Homeschool Radio Shows.  (It also has a PDF Listening and Discussion Guide, but we didn’t use it.)
• The Adventures in Odyssey episode #197 “Midnight Ride” was great for the end of the week.  It discussed some of the inaccuracies in Longfellow’s account and told more of the story.  It helped to be familiar with the poem first, which is why I’d recommend it for at least a few days into rowing this book.

Video:

• I gave Ian a quick introduction to the reasons behind Paul Revere’s famous ride by watching an old Schoolhouse Rock clip called “No More Kings.” (There’s also another Revolutionary War clip called “The Shot Heard Round the World,” but he didn’t understand that one very well, and since it happened after Paul Revere’s ride, I didn’t spend much time trying to explain it.)
• The boys both really enjoyed “The Flame Returns” from an episode of Animaniacs, which was basically an animated reading of the poem. (Warner Bros. has since had this clip removed from YouTube.)  Even now, a couple of weeks later, they keep quoting their favorite part.
• We spent lunchtime each day watching the show Liberty’s Kids, culminating with the fifth episode, “The Midnight Ride.”  (You can get the whole series of 40 episodes on DVD for only $8.25.  I jumped on it when it was on sale for even less because I knew we’d use it for homeschooling at some point.)
• Finally, we watched “The Birth of a Revolution” from the Learn Our History series.  If you get any homeschool emails, you’ve probably been bombarded with offers about this series by Mike Huckabee.  We tried it just to get the free “One Nation Under God” DVD, but Ian liked it so much I decided to keep the subscription coming.  The animation is pretty cheesy by today’s standards, so I really didn’t think he’d be that into it, but he requests various DVDs from the series over and over.  They really do have good information about American History, so we’re going to keep getting the DVDs each month for now.

The only lesson from the manual that I wanted to share about was our art lesson.  We talked about the use of light in all the pictures, and looked at how the moon was reflected in the water in several of them.  I wasn’t going to attempt anything hands-on until I read Heather’s post at blogshewrote.org, in which she described her children’s experience with this lesson.  Ian wasn’t terribly excited about drawing his picture (though he did enjoy using the special oil pastels I broke out for the occasion).  He still finds drawing rather frustrating, and having me do a picture along side him didn’t help.  Sometimes it inspires him, but this time it just made him ask me to take over his picture because he couldn’t make it look the way he hoped.  Still, I kept encouraging him, and in the end he managed to capture the whole idea of the reflection (at least with the masts and the moonlight), so I considered it a success and praised him for his efforts.  I’m glad we ended up rowing this book now.  I love history, especially American history, so it was fun to start teaching Ian about the birth of our nation.

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.

The Glorious Flight by Alice and Martin Provensen is one of those Five in a Row books I was unfamiliar with and not terribly motivated to pick up, but it turned out to be a wonderful “row,” and I’m glad it’s part of our family library.  I know it’s one Ian’s going to go back to time and again.  I have to confess, it’s one of the few times we’ve actually managed to re-read the book every single day.

We did several of the lessons in the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1).  I love being able to just introduce ideas like Roman numerals.  I wrote out 1, 5, and 10 on a whiteboard, and then we talked about how to make the other numbers mentioned in the book.  He caught on more than I thought he was going to, which was great.  I know he probably won’t remember, but having this introduction will help the next time we touch on the subject.

The same was true of our GeoPuzzle of Europe.  Ian loves puzzles, and just mentioning the name of each country as we put it together will help him build familiarity.  (I love that the pieces are shaped like the countries so almost every one has its own piece.)  We talked about other stories we’ve read that are set in Europe, and he loved pointing out the things he knew.

We watched several fascinating videos about flight.  The one most related to the book was A Daring Flight from Nova, which went into much greater detail about Louis Bleriot’s determined attempts to build a flying machine in the years leading up to his flight across the English channel.  I highly recommend this one, especially for older rowers.  (Even at 5, however, Ian really enjoyed it.  We broke it into two segments and he did just fine with it.)  A more age appropriate recommendation is the Reading Rainbow episode “Bored – Nothing to Do!” about two boys who works to build an airplane. (We also liked the Reading Rainbow episode “Hot Air Henry,” which has clips of various flying machines that failed.  It cracked my boys up and they kept watching that part over and over!) We also liked the Bill Nye the Science Guy episode on “Flight” we found at the library.  I wasn’t sure if it would go over well with my crew or not since it said it was for grades 4 and up.  However, it seems to have been designed for kids with short attention spans, so Ian did fine with it and asked for “the next one.” I guess he thought it was like watching a series on Netflix.  (Elijah watched parts with us but said it was “too long.”)  Ian enjoyed it so much he watched it twice over two weeks, along with another DVD we borrowed: Eyewitness DVD: Flight.

Overall, this book made quite an impression on Ian.  The videos we watched really brought it to life for him, and he loved looking at old photographs of Papa Bleriot’s various planes.  We only talked a little about the Wright Brothers through the week, but he remembered them from the videos and was excited to see a model of one of their gliders when we visited the California Science Center‘s exhibit on flight at the end of our “row.”  And any time we come across a picture of a bi-plane, it’s a big deal now!  We finished out our study with a family movie trip to see Planes, and he loved pointing out things he’d learned about.  I know he’s going to have a great time when he gets to go along with Daddy to the small local airport where Daddy sometimes does some mechanical work!

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 had a fun week of learning as we rowed A Pair of Red Clogs by Masaka Matsuno.  I chose it because we’ve been reading The Japanese Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins, which Ian has really enjoyed, though I’ve had some reservations. (See my notes at the end of this post.)*

In keeping with one of the themes in the book, we spent quite a bit of time discussing honesty.  We read The Value of Honesty: The Story of Confucius by Spencer Johnson, as well as a poem called “The Boy Who Never Told a Lie” from The Book of Virtues (p.601) by William J. Bennett.  Our Bible memory verse for the week was Proverbs 12:22.  “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight.”

We discussed several of the lessons in the Five in a Row manual Vol. 1 throughout the week, and for the first time, we attempted the art lesson.  Art has not been one of Ian’s strengths, and I’ve held off on even attempting any of the lessons because he struggled even with basic coloring and drawing.  However, I have intentionally made art instruction a part of our Kindergarten “curriculum” this year, and on the weeks that we include a FIAR book, I want to try to do the art lessons.  The one for A Pair of Red Clogs was pretty simple, and Ian and I were both quite pleased with the way his picture turned out.

We spent a lot of time this week learning about Japan.  Both boys enjoyed playing a memory matching game using the continent cards  I made from part of the Grandfather’s Journey lapbook on HomeSchoolShare.  (Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say, also set in Japan, is another book used in FIAR Vol. 1, but Ian was really resistant to the story for some reason, and I didn’t want to push a book he wasn’t interested in.  He did, however, enjoy reading Tree of Cranes, also by Allen Say.  I made an origami crane and all three kids were fascinated by it.)  The boys also put together our GeoPuzzle of Asia. (I bought the complete set last year when they were on sale at Timberdoodle.com, but it’s the first time we’ve gotten one out.) We watched Big Bird in Japan on YouTube, and then later in the week we watched two episodes of 19 Kids and Counting: Duggars Do Asia.  Both boys really enjoyed watching the Duggars explore Tokyo (available free on iTunes under Volume 8) and Kyoto.  These shows provided a fascinating look at some of the unique aspects of Japanese culture.

They also reminded me of our international coin collection, and I went digging through the coins to see if I could find some Japanese yen (which I identified with help from Wikipedia).  All three kids LOVE playing with coins, and we were able to look at how the numbers are the same as our numbers whereas the characters are very different from our letters.  I used that as an opportunity to go to a website that translates your name into Japanese katakana characters.  Ian thought it was so interesting, we ended up looking up the names of everyone in our family, our cousins, and the neighbors.

The one thing we didn’t do that I had wanted to was a science activity about making rain that I found on another blog.  Maybe someday we’ll get around to this one, because I think it’s a great way of teaching about the water cycle.  Still, we had a pretty full week, and everyone learned a lot and had fun doing it, so I’d say it was a successful row!

* The Japanese Twins depicts the traditional Japanese view of women and girls.  I was pretty uncomfortable reading the chapter where the father tells the little girl she must obey her baby brother and tells her to bow down while he puts the baby’s foot on her neck to show his authority over her.  It gave us an opportunity for discussion, I suppose, as did the chapter where they went to the temple and worshiped a goddess.  When I started to ask Ian about that one, he pretty much led the discussion.  Having just studied the 10 Commandments, he had a frame of reference, so it wasn’t a big deal.

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.