World Travel Geography and Saint Study

{Feb 27, 2019 A few updates!
Since I first posted I have added a few new book titles and found some mistakes in the original document. The link below has the latest document. Our saint’s pages have not been happening, and that is ok! We are just taking things at G's pace, covering the very basics, and following her interests. It has been a wonderful year so far combining these units. It is really a lot to cover, so don't be discouraged trying to cover everything. Just use it as a framework and do what makes the most sense for your family. We have also *tried* to cover some artists and musicians for our art/music study, based on the places we are "visiting".}


Well Hello! It has been literally 2+ years since I have been able to post anything. I have so many posts started, especially fun Five in a Row ideas I’ve promised to share with some friends, but between a crazy-busy couple of years (grieving the loss of my father and helping my mom through her cancer journey, among other life happenings) and a computer that won’t cooperate, I have been on hold with my blogging. The computer issues have been resolved. Now if only I could squeeze in the time!

For today, I wanted to share a list I created to use with a combo unit for my "G" for this school year. I really enjoy using Catholic Heritage Curricula’s Tour a Country and Explore the Continents units. As crazy as it may be, I have decided to combine them into one unit of study. I will most likely not be able to cover everything in each unit, but it just made sense to me, for many reasons, to combine the 2. Catholic Heritage Curricula has now added a supplemental book called Our Friends from Other Lands, to be used with Tour a Country. It is a spiral bound book which "includes stories and country overviews for 27 countries". I have decided to add these stories in as well.

Explore the Continents

Tour a Country

I have put together all 3 units into one study for the year. We will cover the basics of each country/continent, landmarks, attractions, climate, lifestyle etc, and place an emphasis on saints from each country we study.

I have also added Five in a Row titles to use in tandem, if time allows. I don’t foresee having the time to do traditional FIAR activities, but these fabulous books take you all over the world, so I have coordinated the list to be used as "go-alongs".

We will generally focus on one continent a month. I will use November and December for one continent since both months are so busy. There is enough flexibility with the study ending in April, (along with Australia and Antarctica covering less) that we have the ability to add time on if needed.

Please note: This is meant to be a springboard for your own ideas. Please do not feel you have to cover everything listed and read every book. These are simply ideas which I have organized into one place, and have decided to share in case someone may find it helpful.

I usually will check books out of the library about each continent/country, for example, Spotlight on North America, or Explore South America. As for saints, I am assuming we all have plenty of books or movies to choose from! ;) I don’t study each saint at great length, but read at least some basic info on them, and do further study on a handful. We usually do a small "saint study" by creating a simple scrapbook type of page with key facts, quotes, and pictures.

I use these maps and we place each circle from the student book, pictured above, (saint etc) on the appropriate place.

Here is the link to the document I have created as a plan for the year. See "Notes" section at the end for some helpful information.

I hope you have fun traveling the world with your littles this year!

Blessings,

Jen

Learning Through Books

As I was planning my kindergarten year for "G" I became very excited to plan this years Five in a Row (and other great literature) adventures. This has always been a favorite curriculum of mine. My plans began with finding ways to have fun with the geography aspect (a huge part of FIAR) and quickly snowballed into something a little more.

First, for the geography, I found this passport at Micahels in the scrapbook section. It looks very authentic. I used a 40% off coupon so it really wasn't much.

 I think I will use a picture of her on her first day of school in the photo area.

I am planning to use this world traveler stamp (pictured above) that I purchased in the stamp section a few years back for a different FIAR activity. (note-the link is to a different store. I couldn't find it anywhere else to share here) As we read through our books that take place in different countries we will stamp the passport and add these great stamps that Plano Area Moms FIAR Circle so generously shared. You can even edit the date within the stamp! I will have "G" add a country flag to the page as well. I found some here that I was able to shrink to the perfect size for the mini passport pages. For world travel we have this fun passport but I wanted something to track all the fun places within North America that we'd "travel" to. So I created a sort of passport/ travel log for that too. I used this one FREE from Teachers Pay Teachers. (I printed at a 60% scale in order to have this log be about the same size as the mini passport)

Inside this log We'll use these state flags and these state coin stamps. (This site actually has an entire printable passport, which I found after I already had mine). I still need to find Canadian stamps. I'm sure it won't be too difficult with all the great Pinterest resources!

Here is my snowball idea... I was thinking, while it's so great to focus so much on the geography fun of these awesome books, I should be focusing on all the great lessons and themes that each book offers in a more tangible way. So I created a very simple notebook for "G" to keep track of the things she is learning from each book.

I began with a simple binder

 And added many pages with themes. 

Here are just a few...

As we read each book "G" will add a picture of the book cover to the appropriate page(s) and we'll write a little bit about what she learned. I created this document with images from all the books we'll be reading this year. The amount of covers for each book is based on the amount of themes or lessons for each. (document link below)

I am sure there will be more themes that I will think of as we progress through the books, but we can easily add pages to the binder and quickly add book cover images. I think this is a good starting point and we are ready to go!

If you'd like to use any of these resources you can find the cover and pages for my binder here

The book covers for the books we'll be reading are here

and my themes list, by book, can be found here. A quick note regarding my notes in parentheses in this document; F&L stands for Fold and Learn. If you follow the Five in a Row Blog you will receive a link to free prinatbles to go along with many of the books. HS Share is for the website Homeschool Share. They offer free lapbooks for tons of books, themes etc. Those are just my personal notes to remember what activities I need to print. I left them in to hopefully help you as well. 

We are very excited to take off on our adventure through books! I hope you have fun learning your way through books too! 

 

Blessings,
Jen

Preschool Corner~ Wild Horses of Sweetbriar

 Since the beginning of our school year I have hoped to start posting our preschool happenings in an effort to keep my sweet little one's godmother in the loop of her little world. Here we are in May and I'm just now posting something. Life! What can I say?! No matter how much I desire to blog I won’t let it take me away from my family too much. So here we are…I suppose I can begin now and work backwards! I will still try to post things we have done throughout this school year because we simply love our Five in a Row book studies. 

Five in a Row (FIAR) is a literature based curriculum. (here is why it's called FIAR!) I have used it over the years with my kids from Before FIAR to Beyond FIAR. About 5 years ago a few ladies in my homeschool group created a “FIAR Club”.  We read the books at home and met monthly for some fun activities together. The memories of those club days are so special to me and my now 11 y.o. This year I have tried to recreate some of that fun with my 4 y.o. It’s been a blast! 

Last week we read Wild Horses of Sweetbriar as our FIAR book and My Chincoteague Pony as an extra to go along with the same theme. I like to add extra books that have the same theme as often as I can. There are so many great titles, there is hardly enough time to read them all!

I have been doing a mix of FIAR and Before FIAR titles this year. Some of the FIAR books “G” has not been quite ready for. For those we only read once instead of all 5 days. Sometimes she couldn’t even get through that. Others she would sit through many more times than the 5!! 

At times the activities to go along with the books were too advanced for her. Wild Horses of Sweetbriar was one of those, however I couldn't pass on this book because in my home horses and the beach are heaven to just about all of us!! I was part of a book club in two different homeschool groups and in each one I led the meeting for the book Misty of Chincoteague. The activity I created for the children to put together was this mini Chincoteague in a jar. “G” is a little young to create this so I went with a bigger version that she could actually get her hands into, a beach island sensory bin. She absolutely loves sensory bins! 

To do this I gathered these supplies

 

*Sand (from the floral section at Michael's. I chose this over play sand in the craft store b/c it was non-toxic and made in USA. Sadly the kids sand did not say non-toxic))
*Greenery that looks like sea grass (.50 cents at Michael's)
*Play horses from the girls toys
*Blue glass beads (for water) from Michael's
*Little seashells Also available at Michael's (we had some leftover from the last project for Misty)
*Play sand pail from the girls American Girl collection
*Plastic bin-I use the lids to those disposable pans. I always seem to have those on hand.
*Fence- I had a little fence from our Peter Rabbit's Garden sensory bin so I used that as well. It looked beachy!

Here is the finished product. Super easy! 

 

And let the fun begin!

 

 

 

  

Here is the pony swim!!

"G" had so much fun using this sensory bin. 

We still have it assembled so she can continue to play with it.

Here are the two books I used for this unit this past week. You can see all the books I have used for my wild ponies units in the below links.
Both of these books are out of print, but usually a local library will have them.

 

Here are my previous units on island ponies and Misty of Chincoteague
Island Ponies Pt. 1 (Misty)
Island Ponies Pt. 2
Places to see wild ponies on the beach:
Assateague Island, MD
Chincoteague Isalnd,VA
Sable Island, Nova Scotia
Various North Carolina Islands
Cumberland Island, GA
Payne's Prairie Preserve, Gainesville FL 

"But in my heart, I knew I would only need wild horses and the wind from the sea." ~Wild Horses of Sweetbriar

Our Cranberry Day

November 21, 2013
There are days when I begin on track but quickly take a detour! Last week I had one of these detour days. Before I explain our detour I will give a little background as to why I derailed. This time of year the girls and I make lots of cranberry bread and muffins. We like using cranberries as much as we can while they are in season. A couple of weeks ago we were excited to find this recipe for Sugared Cranberries. YUM! We made these and threw some into muffins (just the soaked ones, before rolling in sugar). We also really enjoyed eating them after the second step (rolling them in sugar). We kept them in the fridge and would just go eat a few here and there. They were a fun treat. Jessica at Shower of Roses has a recipe for these using them in cupcakes and decorating the top with them. You can see it here under "snack time" about half way down the page.

 So, since we have been all about cranberries these past few weeks I became very excited when I read the latest Five in a Row blog post . I have enjoyed reading the book Cranberry Thanksgiving with my young kiddos but I really liked the other ideas I read in the post. It got me thinking about a quick mini-unit on cranberries, and there you have it-DETOUR!! We had such a fun day!

 We watched some YouTube videos on harvesting cranberries. Then we filled a container with cranberries and poured water in as if to flood a bog. Of course this led to tons of water splashing, cranberries bouncing -all-over-the-kitchen- fun. Lots of giggles ensued!

 While the kids played a bit I printed off some basic activities to complete a simple mini lapbook of sorts. A few things I found were:

~A fun little activity book at Wisconsin Cranberry Growers Association

~Cranberry Thanksgiving printables at Homeschool Share

~A cranberry coloring page

~Some great resources at the Cape Cod Cranberry Growers Association. There are some really helpful teacher resources and the frequently asked questions section has some facts about cranberries that we used in our mini lapbook.

~Some more great facts at Ocean Spray

~And some great activities in the Five in a Row free FOLD&LEARNs™. I can't redistribute these to you but if you subscribe to the Five in a Row Blog they will send you a link to free FOLD&LEARNs™ and the Cranberry Thanksgiving FOLD&LEARNs™ will be included.

On to the fun stuff!

We played....

We baked....

We bounced...

And we created...

Here is a recipe for Cranberry Apple Crisp. It is soooo good! I have since made it again! The day we did this cranberry unit I had already planned to make this Cranberry Chicken recipe, so that went perfectly with the days theme.


And I don't know how I have missed this all these years, but did you know you can freeze them?! We will be stocking up to have cranberry goodness all year!

Have fun!
Jen