FIAR - Volume 1: Cranberry Thanksgiving

We rowed "Cranberry Thanksgiving" the week before Thanksgiving. This is a wonderful story on how appearances can be deceptive and accepting people for their values. We loved this row and had a lot of wonderful conversations based on the theme of this story.

Picture taken from http://www.newenglandrcd.org/

This story is set in the New England region, so we identified the states in this region and located it on our USA map. We also discussed how cranberries are harvested and looked at pictures of it online.  Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry for beautiful pictures and more information on Cranberries and how they are harvested.

This picture is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry

Of course we had to try out the secret recipe, so we baked cranberry bread with real cranberries and some craisins. The recipe is extremely straightforward so D was able to make it mostly by herself once I measured and set out the ingredients. Here is a picture of the bread pan ready to go into the oven.

Here is a picture after I took it out of the oven.

The bread was delicious! D and I added some sugar and water to the left over cranberries and made a sauce/ jelly that tastes delicious with plain bread!

This is the first year we celebrated thanksgiving with friends and family and we loved the feast and the gathering!

We read "The very first Thanksgiving day" and made our story necklace using the beads we had on hand. We did not have white beads for snow, so we substituted yellow ones! D had a lot of fun retelling this story several times!

This idea is originally from here.  It was a great row and a perfect Thanksgiving, though I am a week late in posting this! Better late than never!  Since we did do some Montessori themed activities (baking and bead lacing) I am linking this up to Montessori Monday.