FIAR - Volume 1: The Story About Ping

We rowed "The Story About Ping" by "Marjorie Wise" for our first session of FIAR.

"The Story about Ping" is a delightful story about a duckling in China that escapes from punishment only to find himself alone on the Yangtze river, where he encounters different situations.  In the end he eventually decides that accepting his punishment and getting back home is way better than the other option.

We've discussed/done the following so far:

1. Located China on the map and pointed to the Yangtze river.
2. Learnt that the capital of China is Beijing.
3. Identified the Chinese flag on our Flags of the World Poster.
4. Colored the China map and the Chinese flag.
5. Read the following books related to China and the Chinese culture:
1. The Story of Noodles - A fun story about how noodles were invented.
2. The Story of Kites - How and why the Kite was invented.
3. One Year in Beijing - A Journal style account of a little's girls one year life in Beijing.  D loved this book the most.
4. Daisy comes home - A cute story about a chicken named daisy that gets lost.
6. Watched a few shows from the Wild China Series on Netflix.  It was amazing to watch Cormorants fishing for their masters!
7. Went through the Chinese items from our Asia Continent Box.
8. Made Chinese noodles for lunch one day and ate with chopsticks!
9. Learnt about the duck family.
10. Read books on the life cycle of ducks:
1. Duck
2. A Duckling Is Born
11. For art, we did a drawing of a duck and colored it using color pencils just like the illustration in the book by Kurt Wiese.
    
12. D narrated the "The Story about Ping" and I wrote it down.
13. Read "Make Way for Ducklings" by Robert McCloskey.  Such a delightful story!  We would be rowing this again during our FIAR Volume 2 session.
14. We discussed following rules and accepting consequences for your actions.

Below are some other things that I wanted to do, but could not due to lack of time.  We would probably complete some of these at a later date, may be when we row "Make Way for Ducklings".

1. Make a Kite using brown paper bag and ribbons and fly it in our back yard.
2. Learn to say "Hi" and "Bye" in Chinese.
3. Learn to count to 10 in Chinese.
4. Make a family tree of all of D's immediate cousins with their picture.  D would love this activity.
5. Experiment on sink/float and documented our findings.
6. Go and feed the ducks in our nearby park.

For our first rowing, I think we did great!  I tried not to focus too much on actual activities and frustrate D, instead focussed on general discussion about the book and mostly reading.  D loves anything to do with maps and flags so generally enjoyed those activities.  As far as art goes, she did the duck drawing to entertain me, but was not too enthusiastic about it.  So for future rowings I might not include art activities  unless D seems genuinely interested.  She is not into coloring too, so we might avoid that.  For future rowings, I am going to just get ideas from the FIAR manual for general discussion and not do much in terms of actual activities.  The only problem I see with this approach is that we would not have enough stuff to make those wonderful lap books that I see in the various FIAR forums.  But I guess that is ok as this whole process should be for D's enjoyment, not for me!

For our next row, we've selected Madeline and various other wonderful books! Can't wait to get started!

Here are all the titles that we read, linked to amazon: