Learning to Row

I'm so excited to start using Five in a Row this Fall with my five year old. This list of books for Volume 1 is very impressive:

The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese
Lentil by Robert McCloskey
Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
A Pair of Red Clogs by Masako Matsuno
The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills
Who Owns the Sun? by Stacy Chbosky
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton
The Glorious Flight by Alice and Martin Provensen
How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman
Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say
Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin
Another Celebrated Dancing Bear by Gladys Scheffrin-Falk
Papa Piccolo by Carol Talley
Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews
The Clown of God by Tomie DePaola
Storm in the Night by Mary Stoltz
Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton
Night of the Moonjellies by Mark Shasha
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
(with illustrations by Susan Jeffers)

With Five in a Row you read your child the book for the week (in its entirety) each day, hence "five in a row". The teacher's manual offers lessons for language arts, science, history, geography, and math. I've read through the first few titles and their lessons and it just looks like so much fun. The creators of Five in a Row have a suggested lesson plan in the back of each manual, or you can just choose to do the books on your own time frame. I think we will stick with the suggested time frame since this is one of the largest parts of our curriculum this year.

One of my favorite features are the story discs you can copy and laminate from the back of the book and use these discs (one for each book) to affix to your world map. Or, you can purchase them already in color and laminated from Five in a Row. Many of the homeschool sites offer free lapbook templates for FIAR stories. So, maybe I will be able to pull additional activities from the web. At first, however, I will stick pretty close to the teacher's manual just to keep it simple.

One of the very first books is "The Story About Ping" by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese.

It takes place in China along the Yangtze river. Rowing this book will be especially meaningful for our family because we are close friends with a family who will be returning to China in August to adopt their second child. We have followed their first adoption journey to China and I can't wait to meet baby #2, and also for my children to learn through our FIAR story and my friend's blogging while she is in China!

It is my hope to post while we row and share our journey with these beautiful books!

Blogger Templates

Great Kindergarten Resource!

I am researching curriculum options for my to-be homeschool Kindergarten student. One thing I know we will be doing for certain is Five In A Row. Both of my children do almost all of their learning through reading and being read - to. So, this literature based curriculum is right up my son's alley, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if my soon to be nine year old gets a lot out of it, too. So far, the expenditure for this has been $35! (Well, I confess I did have a $50 gift card to Barnes and Noble for several of the story books.)

Something my son has been doing in his preschool this year is writing his letters and numbers. I want this to continue, because he needs work in that area. He reads very confidently and can do simple addition and subtraction, so we don't need to focus a lot on those things just yet. His teachers send home pages to write letters, etc... and I decided I would visit the website they come from. It is a site where you need to register, but everything is FREE. So, head on over to Learning Page! There are printables for all of the letters and numbers, and even cute units on money, time, math, oceans, space, etc... I think we will get quite a few things from this resource next school year.

I am also stocking up on art supplies for next year: lots of googly eyes, feathers, foam squares, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, stamp pads, paints. Wow - I just love the Dollar Tree! They even had Planet Earth animal coloring books for $1. My son loves to color, so these will be great.

My plan for Kindergarten is pretty simple. I want to read read read. I want my son to read read read. I also would like to expose him to as much of God's creation as I possibly can and talk about it all along the way. Add in getting better at writing his numbers and letters and I think we're about set! :-)