A Pair of Red Clogs

Our Five In A Row studies took us all the way to Japan this week with the story, A Pair of Red Clogs.  

On Monday, we did our morning time of quiet time, handwriting (the letter D), and then read A Pair of Red Clogs for the first time. The story is about a little girl named Mako and a time where she didn’t take care of her brand new shoes that she was very proud of and they cracked. She didn’t like them anymore and wanted a new pair so badly that she wasn’t truthful to her mother about them. Her conscious made her feel terrible and she still remembers those red clogs now that she is a grandma. When we first read our story, we talk about the geographical and the cultural aspects of the book. So we colored our story disc and flew all the way to Japan to put it on our world map. We talked about what we knew about Japan, that they sit on the floor sometimes when they eat and they make sushi, one of our favorites! They also like rice like Ping, and everyone knows that is Silas’ favorite. We looked up the Japanese flag and Silas thought it was the easiest flag of all to make and wondered why they chose something so simple. Of course, we had to look that up too. Next, we made a pair of our own red clogs to go in our FIAR Notebook. Silas sharpened his fine and gross motor skills as he used scissors, hole puncher, and twisted pipe cleaners together to make red clogs of his own. We tried them on and put them in our notebook.

Notebooking is a new way we are storing all of our FIAR book studies and it really is turning out so great. It helps me keep track of how much we are doing, has Silas feeling so accomplished as he flips through the pages and explains what each page represents, and is becoming a real treasure of ours. In the afternoon, we continued with our math and reading.

 

Tuesday, we read our story and talked about Honesty. We know honesty is very important and that lying is not a good thing to do. We read extra stories on Honesty from the library and especially liked Ruthie and the Not So Teeny Tiny Lie. We also created a Japanese lantern that looks like a Koi fish.

Since Mako broke her clogs playing a game where they were trying to predict the weather that is what we looked at on Wednesday and Thursday. We typically save experiments for Thursday but since there are so many fun weather projects to do, we had extra experiments this week. Wednesday, we looked at the real tools that scientist use to predict the weather and watched some you tube videos on weather. We learned about the different types of clouds and the water cycle. 

We made our simulated water cycle in a plastic bag and explained it to our brother. We also built rain clouds out of shaving cream with Ezra and enjoyed watching it storm in our cups.

 

Our experiments carried into Thursday where we watched the evaporation and perception process and made steam and then rain in a cup. We also finished our rain sun catcher and added the extra raindrops to our notebook.

Our handwriting, math, and reading lessons went well and we are continuing working on subsidizing numbers 1 – 10 in different ways, making tally marks, and reading short stories together.

We also went to our favorite Japanese restaurant for sushi and noticed the Japanese flag and Koi fish in the artwork displayed!