FIAR– Storm In The Night

We had a good time rowing this book. Before I complete this post I want to say that the way we row books has drastically changed. Originally I had planned to use FIAR as a curriculum. While we love learning through these books it simply wasn’t a good fit for us. I just wanted the rows to be memorable and I [was missing some of that by stressing myself out with to much planning, and really that is not the heart of FIAR. So we are back rowing with a new and refreshed look.

The day we rowed this book it was raining which worked out perfectly. We read the book and then talked a bit about the types of weather mentioned in the book. We then set out our rain gauge and checked it later that day.

We talked about how water gathers places, and went out in the rain to find rain that had gathered. The kids had a blast playing in puddles.

We talked about the water cycle and watched a YouTube video . And then we did an experiment to show the water cycle.

On a whim we decided to do an experiment that shows what happens when the water gathers in the clouds.

 

In this book it talks about grandpa’s fear of storms. We talked a lot about our fears and memorized this scripture. 2 Timothy 1:7

⁷ For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

 

And that was all on a rainy day! It was really a great way to spend that day. I think the kids will have fond memories.

FIAR–Madeline

This is such a cute little book. So simple, yet it contains a learning opportunity on every page. I remember reading Madeline books when I was a child. My kids really liked this one.

 

The kids each made these Madeline stick puppets. They had a blast trying to re-tell the story. Ok, Ok, Hailey had a blast trying to re-tell the story. The boys turned their puppets into “bad guys”, and “good guys”. Very few of their puppets survived, and Liam ate his.

 

Christopher did daily work in this clock book. It’s a great resource for teaching telling time. He also learned about line of symmetry. 

 

Hailey and Christopher enjoyed their Little Passports package from France. We located Europe and France on the our map. And Christopher made a little travel through France thing from Homeschoolshare.com.

We talked about our organs, and read through the book Uncover Human Body. It is a really neat book. the kids also colored the organs using a sheet from Homeschoolshare.com

The kids had all to much fun pretending to have a scar just like Madeline. But wait, one had a real scar.

Just in case you couldn’t tell This is the flag of France.

We had a blast with this unit.

FIAR/BFIAR- Stopping by Woods and The Snowy Day

Both of these books seemed to fit nicely together. We had fun doing projects to go along with Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. My youngest boys didn’t really understand the poem so that’s where I tied in The Snowy Day. We did not cover every subject with these books, and kept our projects simple and fun. Here’s what we did.

Hailey and Christopher made animal classification books

Hailey, Christopher, and Sammy made Borax snowflakes.

The kids all made paper snowflakes and we talked about how each snowflake is different, and how God created each one of us different, but we all serve a purpose.

We all (including me) painted a scene from the book Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Hailey and Christopher learned about different types of Poetry. They had a blast with tongue twisters. They each wrote a poem as well.

I picked up some “make your own snow” from the Dollar Tree and the kids had fun playing with that.

I printed a few things for the boys to do. They matched animal tracks, sorted animal classification cards, and matched up snowflakes.

FIAR- A Cranberry Thanksgiving

This story was really cute and the kids loved it as they have with most of our FIAR selections. It is about a grandmother and her granddaughter. The grandmother has a famous cranberry bread recipe that she plans to give to her granddaughter some day. Every year they have a Thanksgiving feast and invite someone who doesn’t normally get a Thanksgiving meal, or who will be alone on Thanksgiving. This story gets to the heart of how we shouldn’t let our judgment of someone be jaded because they don’t fit the image we like, or they aren’t rich, and might not look the way we want.

 

Bible: Matthew 22:1-14 /The Wedding Banquet 

In this book the Grandmother invites someone to the feast based on his looks and what his status seemed to be. (he had a gold cane) Grandmother soon finds out that this was not a wise choice and that she shouldn’t judge based on appearance or status. I read the story of the wedding banquet to the kids and we talked about how it was (kinda) similar to this story, and about how the story applies to our lives. The kids really seemed to respond to this lesson.

Geography: New England States, Vermont

The kids enjoyed locating all of the New England states on the map. We had studies the New England states when we rowed Night of the Moonjellies so it was fun to see what they remembered. To my surprise they located three without my help. The New England states are. Connecticut, Main, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. We chose to take a closer look at Vermont, and the kids colored the Vermont page of their Color the States book.

History/Social Studies/Language Arts: Life as a pilgrim, The First Thanksgiving, Vocabulary Words

We read the book The First Thanksgiving. It gave a decent historical account of The First Thanksgiving in a way that the kids could understand. We also read a book called Christopher Columbus that was a little bit more “real”. I wasn’t sure about it, but it was actually a good discussion to have with them about how we treat people, and why it is important to learn the difficult parts of history so that we don’t repeat those mistakes.

In the back of the book The First Thanksgiving there were some really great discussion Q & A’s about life as a pilgrim. We also went through this awesome online tour together. It was really neat. http://www.plimoth.org/media/olc/intro.html

At the end of The First Thanksgiving there were vocabulary words. I went over the words with Christopher, and had Hailey choose five of the words to look up in the dictionary and record her answers.

Art: Warm and Cool Color Pallet

I had a lesson all planned out for this. We sat down and started talking about the difference in Warm and Cool colors. This was a really bug off day for the kids. So, I let them watch the newest Tinkerbell movie and had them point out the different colors in the warm world and the cool world. Not to worry though because the next day we completed the original lesson I had planned.

 Memory Making: Thanksgiving Feast of their own

The kids invited some friends that live down the street from us over for a Thanksgiving Feast. (snack time) This was the highlight of our Row.