"La-la-la-la-lei!"

This year for school we're using the Five in a Row curriculum.  I'm super excited to use this as last year we had some challenges with Sonlight and ended up dropping it altogether, which resulted in my scrambling to cobble together a curriculum for Libby's kindergarten year.  It ended up being a great year, but I wasn't looking forward to going it alone again this year, so I was very happy when a friend told me about Five in a Row (I'll call it FIAR from now on).  I checked out a few of the manuals from my library for a preview and was hooked from the first page.  Last week we kicked off our 2012/2013 school year with "The Story About Ping"

The way FIAR works is, you take a great children's book, read it every day for 5 days, and each day study a different subject - Science, Art, Social Studies, Language Arts, and Applied Maths.  Each day you add in whatever else you deem necessary - for us it's math, phonics, handwriting, spanish, scripture, reading, music, health/PE, and a little extra science and LA.  Last week for Ping we studied ducks and bouancy vs density for science, as well as learning about how and why water reflects light.  Besides reading lots of books about ducks, we did a "preening" experiment, getting some bluejay feathers wet, then rubbing them with oil like ducks do to make them waterproof.  It was fun to see the water run right off those bluejay feathers.  We sank and floated things in water, made a "density parfait" with water, oil, and maple syrup and floated things at different levels.  We talked about what makes ducks (and people) bouyant and why we sometimes float, sometimes sink in water.  Saturday we went to the park to feed the ducks and the girls yelled out when they spotted ducks that were "dabbling" (tail up, head under the water) or "preening".  We found reflections of trees, ducks, rocks, and ourselves in the water.  Then we went to the pool and the girls experimented with their own bouyancy with and without lifejackets.  Libby was determined to touch the bottom of the pool while wearing a life jacket, but it just wouldn't work.  She finally conceeded that it wasn't possible to defy bouancy :).

The kids learned how to locate China and the Yangtze River on a world map.  We read books about the culture, history, and geography of China.  We learned that the Yangtze river is yellow because of the yellow loess soil along the river.  We also learned that 1 out of 15 people in the entire world lives along the Yangtze, and that it's the third longest river in the world, right behind the Nile and the Amazon.  Like the Amazon, the Yangtze has it's own breed of river dolphin, and because of a new dam built in the 90's, there are now less than 100 of those dolphins left along the river.  The kids practised eating with chopsticks, and had a lot of fun.


For art we examined the illustrator's use of colored pencils in the pictures, and how he was able to layer the colors to make new colors.  Also how he was able to use the colors to show the brightness of a river scene in the morning sun, versus the shadows of that same scene at night.  We learned how the artist used puddles and drips to indicate wetness, and then practised it ourselves.  The kids (and some neighbors) also made their own ducks out of paper plates:

Jaina's is actually a brown speckled warbler.  If you call it a duck, she'll yell at you.

By the end of the week, the kids were able to quote straight from the book, and call "La-la-la-la-lei" to their toys.  All in all, it was a wonderful week.  I'm excited to continue on this week with "A Pair of Red Clogs" and Japan.  We'll be making our own Japanese clogs (Geta) while we read the book.  Fun!