Rowing Katy

There's a lot of lingo in the homeschooling world and I guess I am expected to say that this week we rowed our first book with Five in a Row. I love learning from books. I first discovered this curriculum on the sites of other homeschooling moms and was drawn to it because it's just a list of general guidelines for doing exactly that, and because it is holistic in nature. The basic premise is that you read one book daily for a week and base a week's worth of learning around that one book. I'm not big on measuring a week's worth of learning, nor am I big on strict rules, but I'm new at this and I love suggestions. Many of the suggestions in FIAR are things that we've already been doing—talking about the illustrations in books and the vocabulary in them—but I'm finding many of the suggestions to be good brainstorming jump starters. This week we read Katy and the Big Snow, by Virginia Lee Burton, and had a great time doing some of the suggested activities and more. We will never limit learning to five days, five reads, or really in any way, but we both really enjoyed the spring board.

Sunday—read book, talked about Katy's antics and the massive amounts of snow; began a weather chart for recording the daily weather throughout the week (we used personal observation and Weatherchannel.com for temperature); talked about maps, the globe, and the compass rose.

Monday—Talked about the importance of all the different people/businesses in a city. Make a list of these and talked about them in relation to our own village. Built a city out of blocks. Calvin really loved building the city out of blocks, as you can plainly see, so we continued to add to this and play without throughout the week (and it's still taking up the whole room as we speak). We also noted the weather on the weather chart.

Tuesday—Defined personification as a literary device and identified its use in the book. Tried our hands at it by drawing characters and captioning. Created vocabulary cards for the words "emergency," "patient," and "drizzle" (Calvin's choices) using our own definitions and illustrations. Built Katy out of Legos (best part of the whole week, I think). Noted weather on chart.

Wednesday—Talked about the medium used by the illustrator (also Virginia Lee Burton) then tried our hand at her style using markers (ink) and crayon (charcoal pencil) in limited colors with only broad details. Kept weather chart.

Thursday—Played a bit with counting by fives and added many marker and crayon drawings to our collection. Weather chart.

Friday—Talked about maps and the compass rose some more. Printed and colored a compass rose and a map of Dexter Village. Went into the village for lunch and identified all the businesses in town and on the map. Went to the library to journal about the differences between Geopolis (Katy's city) and Dexter, and to look up other books by Virginia Lee Burton) and compare the illustrations (we came home with The Little House). Back at home we assembled our lapbook of Katy and the Big Snow and wrote on the weather chart.

Saturday—finished our week long weather chart, compiled the results, talked a little about ratios, and created a Katy and the Big Snow lapbook (not your typical lap book, but more like a folder in which he is keeping all his Katy creations, complete with Calvin-made cover).

Sunday—just for fun we drew a map of the inside of our house and had a big scavenger hunt.

For the most part these activities were chosen by Calvin, and by no means were they the only things we enjoyed all week, but Calvin really enjoyed rowing, and I think we'll do it again. Our way.