FIAR - Volume 1: How to make an Apple Pie and See the World

We rowed "How to make an Apple Pie and See the World" mid October around the time we went apple picking to a nearby orchard.  This is a cute and funny story of how to make an apple pie a little girl goes around the world to get the various ingredients!

Of course there are ample opportunities to indulge in some World Geography in this row.  We located the various countries on our world map and discussed how certain ingredients are native to certain countries.

We went apple picking to a nearby orchard and the kids had so much fun there.  We ended up making apple sauce and some snack sized apple pies with those apples.  We discussed the different kinds of apples we picked and had a taste test to find which one we liked best!

We did some Science by cutting an apple in half and naming the parts of an apple.  We used the free cards from here.

We also got the free lifecycle cards from Montessori for Everyone and D loved this work.

We made some red and white playdough and D made apple pies.

We made apple prints, cutting an apple in half both sideways and length-wise.

We also worked with this poem during this week and poetry is always a favorite in our house.

We had checked out an "Apples" kit from our local library.  So, in addition to the main FIAR book there were other lovely books on Apples that we rowed.  Here are a few from the 10 books we rowed.

We had great fun with this row!  I am so late in posting this! I am linking this up to Montessori Monday.

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.

FIAR - Volume 1: Madeline

I am extremely behind on posting about the FIAR titles that we rowed!  But better late than never!

For our second row we worked with Madeline.

This is a delightful story about a little girl called Madeline what happens when she has an appendectomy.  This story led to so many interesting conversations about boarding school and why parents would do such a thing to their kids!  D still things Madeline's parents are cruel to do that!  We also had conversations about compassion and that was another idea from the book.

We located France and Paris on our world map.  D even colored a French flag.  We talked about the Eiffel Tower and worked with a $1 Eiffel Tower craft from Michaels.  The Tower was difficult to put together and collapsed with the slightest movement.  We had fun though!

We checked out "Crepes" by Suzette from our local library to go with the France theme.



What a delightful book.  We learnt a lot of French phrases and also tried Crepes with the recipe in the book.  I don't have any pictures of our Crepes, because we ate them before clicking some pictures!

Another delightful book that we read based in Paris.  This book is no longer available on Amazon, but here is a picture of the cover.  The author is Catherine Stock.

We also read "Suzette and the Puppy", a story based on a painting by Mary Cassatt.

Since "Madeline", the heroine has an appendectomy we had a lot of interesting conversations regarding taking care of our body.  We read a couple of books on the same topic.

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:

Things that are not Montessori in our Kingdom

We've added three new items to our regular school routine and the three are not specifically montessori.  I wanted something different but at the same time something really close to the montessori principles.  I liked what I saw about these and here they are:

1. All about spelling - Level 1
2. RightStart Mathematics - Level B
3. FIAR Volume 1

All About Spelling - Level 1

So far we love this program!  We do a quick 5-10 minute lesson every other day or at least twice a week.  D is breezing through the first 10 or so lessons as it is the basic pink series stuff.  I love how it is hands on just like Montessori.  It has blue and red letter tiles that are used to spell out words.  D has such an enthusiasm for spelling words that this program is perfect to teach her the rules for spelling.

RightStart Mathematics - Level B

As much as I love Montessori Math, with a curious toddler around it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to get into the school room and get un-interrupted time to work on stuff.  RightStart was developed by a Montessori Teacher and uses almost the same Montessori concrete approach to learning math.  Another awesome feature that I love about this program is how the concepts are re-inforced by playing games instead of putting the child through various repetition worksheets.  D definitely is not a worksheet gal. So far we are loving this and we are going very slow, every other day or just twice a week.  D asks most of the times to play games and I love how she is learning!

Five in a Row- Volume 1

I first came across FIAR here.  I love Laura and was intrigued, so I went on the website to find out what FIAR was all about.  You basically read from a collection of carefully chosen books and you do this for five consecutive days.  Each day after reading the story you can decide to do one or more activities in different subject areas.  There is no set list of activities and this gives the flexibility to do all or just a few. I tried out just one story first and D was so enthusiastic about it.  If you go to the FIAR forums the common practice is to create one lap book per book you read and collect all the activities you did for the week there.  I like that we can look back to see how and what we did!  What I most love about this program is the awesome collection of books.  This has introduced us to a new wonderful set of books and has made us think about books and their contents in ways I would have never been able to do so myself.  Another plus is that because of the flexibility of this program, what I do is put together some trays based on the book we are rowing and let D work at it at her pace.  Once she is done, I save it for her lap book.  For now our local library has almost all of the books in Volume 1 and for those that aren't available locally we use the inter-library loan feature and get at it.

Another awesome thing about doing FIAR is that we are reading so much more now that M is so interested in reading too.  Anytime D and I read a book, M wants me to read her, her books! It is so cute when she gets her books and climbs onto my lap ready to read!  She never did that before!

The biggest advantage to doing all three of the above is that we don't have to always get into the school room to do schooling.  With M getting increasingly curious about D's work, it is very difficult for us to do schooling when she is awake.  We do these on our dining table well out of reach of M.  I usually give something interesting to engage M and spend the 10 - 15 mins that we get to do our stuff.  I have a small area setup in the kitchen near the dining area dedicated to storing these materials.  I love that I don't have to prepare stuff before hand, just need to open the manual and start our lesson!  I am hoping that once M gets a little bigger and once I am able to set some rules with her, we will spend more time in the school room and get back to full fledged montessori.  For now this is working for us and D seems interested and happy.  We are still continuing with Montessori based stuff in other subject areas and finding time to work on these as time permits!  D is only four and I love how homeschooling is giving us the flexibility to adapt our learning methodologies to our current lifestyle!