Five in a Row: Madeline

We have been having lots of fun with our "Five in a Row" curriculum this summer.  It uses classic children's book to teach all sorts of subjects, from art, history, social studies, geography, reading, phonics and even math and science.  Although, we also have a supplemental math and reading/writing/phonics curriculum we use.  Five in a Row is great because it is so easy to use it to teach both kids.  Basically, you read the classic book for five days in a row, each day expanding beyond the book into fun lessons on all sorts of subjects.  We recently read "Madeline" each day and did a ton of fun activities that correlate with the book.  We learned all about Paris, France (which is where the story takes place), from it's geographic location, to its architecture, food and language.  There are actually so many things that one can pull from this awesome book.  We discussed manners, the Human Body anatomy, the artwork that is used in the book and so much more.  There are so many fun lessons that can be pulled from this book, that we actually spanned the lessons over 2 full weeks!

For those who are interested in the "Five in a Row" curriculum, I thought it would be fun to show you what a week or so in the curriculum looks like. You can make it as in-depth as you want.  There are so many free curriculum resources to go along with the "Five in a Row" books.   One of my favorite sites for free curriculum to go along with the books is http://www.homeschoolshare.com/.  Of course, the "Before Five in a Row" curriculum book itself has enough ideas for your full week, but it is always fun to peruse the web to find more fun ideas.  Here is what some of the activities looked like over our 2 week visit to France and Madeline.

First, perhaps it would be a good idea to give you a synopsis of the book, Madeline, so you can understand why we chose some of the activities that we did. Here is the synopsis from the scholastic website:

In an old, vine-covered house in Paris live 12 little girls. They wear wide-brimmed hats and matching yellow outfits, and walk in two perfect rows. Madeline is the smallest girl, and the most daring. She's not afraid to touch a mouse or go near a tiger in the zoo.

But one night she wakes up in pain and Madame Clavel, the mistress of the house, can hear Madeline crying all the way from her own bedroom. Madame Clavel calls the doctor, and in no time, Madeline is rushed to the hospital to have her appendix removed. Everyone at the house misses Madeline, and Madame Clavel decides to take the 11 girls to visit their little friend in the hospital. They take her flowers and find Madeline in her hospital bed happily surrounded by the gifts of toys and candies she has received from well-wishers. Madeline even has a scar to show to them, which the other girls look at with awe, and a little envy. That night, back at the house, Madame Clavel again hears the crying of a little girl. She hurries to the bedroom where the girls sleep in two rows of beds and discovers every single one of the remaining girls crying in pain, all of them wanting to go to the hospital and get gifts, and a scar, just like Madeline!

The book was full of so many art lessons. The watercolor illustrations by Ludwig Bemelmans are gorgeous.   So, one day I taught the kids about monochromatic art.  The author used a lot of monochromatic pictures in the book.  So, I let each of the kids pick one color and use various shades of the color to color a picture of the Eiffel tower.

Luke selected green.

And Abbey selected her current favorite color:  blue.  You can see we are still working on the proper way to hold the crayon.

Their masterpieces.

Abbey did some sorting of some little girls from smallest to largest ("and the smallest one was "Madeline"), while Luke did some copywork ("They left the house at half past nine in two straight lines in rain or shine-- the smallest one was "Madeline".)

Since the book touches on manners, we talked about manners as well.  I gave the kids various scenarios and asked them individually for the correct response.  For example, "What should you say when you are mean to someone or when you hurt someone?"   They both responded with "you should say you are sorry."

We had fun taking a tour around Paris, France.   We first looked at it on the globe and saw how far away it was from us.  We also got on the internet and looked at some photos of architecture around Paris.  We decided that they had some beautiful buildings that we would love to visit someday.

We did several fun math activities.  One of the activities we did involved first coloring and cutting out some of the "girls" in the madeline book.

Then, since the book discusses there being "twelve little girls in two straight rows", Luke figured out how many girls would be in each row if there were two rows and 12 girls total.  We did the same with three rows and four rows.

But, we probably had the most fun with the anatomy portion of the study!  You see, in the book, Madeline becomes ill and must have surgery to remove her appendix.  Early in our study we spent a good amount of time one day (ok, maybe we did this on several days) playing with an iPad application by Tinybot called, "The Human Body".  It is so much fun!  When you are within the app, there is a panel on the left that looks like a menu showing different body parts.  Here you can display or hide layers, such as the nervous system, circulation system, skeleton, etc. Within the individual systems, you can see the organs, parts of organs and so on. The kids' favorite thing to do on the app is to show the digestive system and then drop food or drink into the mouth and watch it pass through the body.   You can zoom in on specific parts of the digestive system (such as the stomach, large intestine or rectum) and see the food progress through the system.  I bet you can guess where the kids spent the most time--ha!  Zoom into the mouth and you can chew food and brush the teeth. If you show the skeleton, all the major bones are labelled and you can actually pull out the bones and then try to place them back in the right places in the body for extra learning value.  Anyway, it is so much fun and the kids and I had so much fun with it.  I am not sure if there is a cost for the app, as we got it for free some time ago.  Towards the end of our study, we made a couple of interactive, wearable sets of organs.  This one requires some explanation with photos.  These are hilarious to me!

The kids colored their intestines and we cut out other body parts as well.  We also added to plastic baggies to the end of straws to show how our lungs inflate when we breath air in.  There is one more baggie at the end of our esophagus that is supposed to be the stomach.

It looks like Luke is testing the limits of his lungs!

Abbey was more gentle on her set of lungs.

We also had fun dropping rocks down our "esophagus" to see it land in the stomach.

you can see the rock Luke just dropped into his esophagus.

 

But, he very quickly went back to trying to collapse his lung. 

Abbey on the other hand, decided dropping rocks into the esophagus and watching it land in the stomach was fun and went searching for more rocks.  Her poor stomach!

And we couldn't end the tour of Paris without trying out some french food.    One day, when the kids and I were at Whole Foods, I let them try a chocolate crescent.

Do you see the looks of satisfaction on their faces?  We don't do sweets very often--so when they do have them they really appreciate them. 

But, I decided that if we were going to do some french food, we also needed to have a french meal at home.  So, we decided on some escargot.  We have a ton of snails around our home, so the ingredients were right there and free.   Just Kidding!!!!  We decided on crepes.  So we finished our tour of Paris with some savory and then sweet crepes.  For the savory crepes, I cooked some potatoes and sweet onions in butter with some of our rosemary until they were a little caramelized.  Then, I made a bechamel sauce (which is a french sauce used in a variety of dishes).  Lastly, I cooked some organic, uncured bacon and used the bacon grease to scramble some pastured chicken eggs.  So, once I flipped the crepe over to cook the other side, I layered a little gruyere cheese, potato/onion mixture, bacon and eggs and once finished cooking, rolled them up.  A topped them with the bechamel sauce.  Oh my goodness!  These crepes were the bomb!  Then, for desert, the kids and at a dessert crepe with some dark chocolate, peanut butter and bananas, while Drew had one with dark chocolate and strawberries.  Our bellies were very happy.  What a great way to end our Madeline study!

Abbey thought they were finger licking good!

And we read, "Madeline" one last time while we finished dessert.

We are excited about our next study in Five in a Row!

Being Crafty

I am not very crafty.  Although, I really want to be.  I love pinterest but I try to spend as little time as possible on it, because I know what would happen if I spent more time on it.  Right now, I basically use it to save some recipes or organize some homeschool activities that I want to eventually do with the kids.  If I spent more time on the site, I would very likely spend a lot of time making tons of boards full of lots of lovely crafts that I would have great intentions of creating.  However, I would never do most of them.  So, it would truly be a waste of my time.  I think with this season of life, the biggest reason is that I am just too busy.  But also, I am just not really crafty. 

Being my kids' homeschool teacher though is requiring me to step out of my comfort zone and be more crafty.  We don't do elaborate crafts, and most don't turn out looking like the photos on pinterest, but at least the kids got the experience.  So recently, when we decided to buy a cheap, boring step from Ikea, I decided to let the kids make it pretty with paints.  We were planning on using the step stool for getting onto the trampoline, so it didn't need to match any specific decor.

This is what the stool looked like before we made it "pretty".

   

I decided to spray it down with a coat of white paint to begin with.  While the paint was drying, I asked Luke and Abbey to design what they wanted the step to look like when finished.  I wanted them to go into the project with a plan instead of just throwing paint on the step.  I felt like this would be a great experience for them on "brainstorming" and seeing an idea from for inception into a finished product.

Luke has his "thinking/concentrating face" one...look at that mouth!

After they finished planning, it was time to start painting!

It was hard work--and Luke wanted to make sure he covered every square inch of that step stool!

Want to see the finished product?  Warning--it is very colorful.  But, I think it is fun and it looks like tie-dye.  I let the kids totally do this product themselves and I think they really enjoyed having control over the project.  I did ask them at the end if they wanted their hand prints on top, and they both excitedly exclaimed, "yes!"  So, I did help with that part. 

Our One Day Vacay!

Drew and I were talking recently about vacations and realized it has been about 5 years since our last "vacation" (meaning a trip we go on to explore a new area and doesn't involve mainly visiting family.)  We love our families a ton and we usually spend a lot of our time off visiting them; and then we use the other days just taking care of stuff (appointments, etc) around our town.   When we travel to Oklahoma, two of the vacation days are spent traveling, so that uses up a lot of the time.  Anyway, we had planned long ago that when we visited my parents and family in Oklahoma for the big Independence Day extravaganza, we would take an extra day or so and stop somewhere along our route for a little exploration.  We drive right through the Dallas/Fort Worth area, so decided to pick either Dallas or Fort Worth for our one day excursion.  There is so much to do in those areas!  It was so difficult to choose where to spend our time for the one day--do we go to the awesome looking Perot museum, Legoland, Great Wolf Lodge, one of the popular Zoos, botanical gardens, etc?  We finally decided on Fort Worth, because although Drew and I have actually been exploring in Dallas, neither of us had ever explored Fort Worth.  So, we planned our trip a couple of days out from our departure; ha--we have been super busy!  We decided to go to the zoo (it's half price on Wednesdays), then check out the stockyards, eat at a good restaurant and maybe check out the botanic garden.

The trip was such a success.  We all had so much fun and it was a great break for just one day with all the stuff we have had going on lately.  We always said after I finished chemotherapy, surgeries and radiation we would plan a fun trip to celebrate.  Well, that never happened.  Life happened and so vacations did not.  This little taste of a vacation definitely left us yearning for more time like this.  Some day, we would love to take a couple of weeks off and just drive around to different parts of the country to explore. 

We left early Wednesday morning last week and headed straight to the Fort Worth Zoo.  We arrived around 10:20 and there was a huge line of vehicles waiting to enter the Zoo.  But, we were able to get a great parking spot, and the crowds were not bad at all the rest of the day!

I picked what I thought was a great zoo outfit.  Unfortunately, I valued the fashion above comfort when selecting my outfit.  Running shoes just wouldn't look right with my outfit, so I selected some flats that I thought would be comfy.  After about 20,000 steps that day though, my blistered feet were not happy.  But, the fun more than made up for it.

We got to get up close to a ton of amazing animals.

This was the coolest crocodile!  He was huge and came right up to the glass to visit with us!

I wouldn't want to bump into this guy under water!

Look at those teeth!

and his skin....okay, maybe I was just a little obsessed with him.  How often does one get this close to a crocodile though?

Our little girl gives the best hugs at random times--which makes it even better since it is not even expected.  She decided to hug Drew as we waited for a fun animal show to begin. 

And when she sits next to us, she always has her hand sweetly on us..whether grasping our arm or gently laying on our leg.

The zoo had some fun shows.

They even had an indoor show about weather.  They used lights and sounds to make it look like there was a lightning/thunder storm in the theater--and then it started raining.  We got a little wet, and Luke was pretty scared--it was very realistic.

The zoo was beautiful and almost completely shaded.  There were so many natural areas, including several waterfalls.  Our $6/adult tickets and $4/child tickets were well worth it!

After seeing Abbey's favorite animal--the flamingos, we left the zoo.  We had an awesome time there!

The kids were so excited about checking into the hotel.  The last time Luke was in a hotel, he was a baby so he doesn't remember what a hotel was like.  He asked on the way there, "Are Abbey and I going to sleep in the same room as you?  How are Abbey and I going to sleep in the same room as you--don't you usually turn the tv on after we go to bed?"  Ha!  And then he asked, "so are Abbey and I going to sleep in the same bed?"  When we replied with a, "yes", both kids got even more excited.  The idea of the hotel may have been the thing they were most excited about on this trip.  So, after the zoo trip, we checked into our hotel room.  They thought it was just the best thing ever.  (Let me tell you though--it wasn't!  It was no "Four Seasons, but had a couple of beds and some air conditioning.  Actually, it even had a free breakfast in the morning, so there was that!)  Luke and Abbey were sad when we told them we would be leaving the hotel to visit the stockyards.  "But, what are the Stockyards?" they replied.  "We want to stay at the hotel!"  Based on what they had seen at the hotel, nothing could be as fun as that. So, we left on that note anyway, and headed to the stockyards.  We arrived just in time for a tiny bit of shopping before the cattle drive at 4pm.

Here they come...

Boy, it would be tiring holding those heads up all day. I would want a break--just a little bit to hang up my horns and rest my head for a while.

and the cattle drive was done in about 5 minutes.

After the visit to the stockyards, we traveled to downtown Fort Worth to grab some dinner and check out the area.  All the while, the kids were asking repeatedly, "when can we go back to the hotel?"  Of course, Drew and I were a bit concerned about how the evening would go sleeping all in the same room, so we planned on getting to the hotel just in time for bed.  We hoped that after a long day of lots of fun the kids would be ready to crash.

Thus, after dinner, we did some more walking around downtown.

We found a fun statue to stand in front of.

It didn't quite work for Luke though...

We also explored some fun architecture.

Even the steps were gorgeous.

I really enjoyed the downtown area. It was very walkable and there was a lot to do in a small area.  After our downtown visit, we tried to get a little trip to the botanic gardens in.  But, we didn't get to see too much since they closed at 8pm.   Thus, we finally headed back to the hotel, which Abbey called "our bedroom".  The kids were giddy.  There was about an hour of a pattern of talking and giggling and then Luke exclaiming "stop touching me" (followed by Abbey's, "But I am just trying to give you a hug") in their bed before they finally fell asleep.

We left the next morning after eating breakfast and headed to Oklahoma.  We made a stop on the way to visit my aunt, Clara Sue and Uncle, Randy's home/farm as it was on our way into town.  They weren't able to come to the July 4th festivities, so it was awesome to be able to spend a little time with them at their lovely home.  Clara Sue is an amazing cook, and even made us an awesome lunch from scratch.   Then, we got to play outside and had a fun time visiting with them before heading to my parents' house.

Luke was beyond excited to get to ride with Drew on this.  He had seen four-wheelers at the Bass Pro Shop the week prior and asked when he could ride on one someday.  His dream came true way faster than I thought it would!

can you tell how excited he is?

While daddy and Luke rode the four-wheeler, Abbey, Clara Sue and I went around to the other side of their house to feed their horse, Lucky, some special treats.

She was checking my camera out--seeing if it was something she could eat.

We also fed the cattle some treats.  Although, the bull, Randolph, hogged most of them.  He allowed his ladies about 20 seconds to get up there and get a snack and then he pushed them away so he could have some more.

We had so much fun on our little 24 hour vacation!  We decided that we may need to take the little one day vacay on the way to Oklahoma again someday.  There is a lot to do in Dallas that we have not done yet! Plus, it breaks the drive up into two much easier drives--which is a great thing for Drew and I AND the kids!