Posted in The Story About Ping
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Today was our last day of studying The Story About Ping. We've enjoyed it so much, I'll be sad to set it aside and move on! I wonder if all the books will be this way?
We did a lot of fun things today: crafts, made a great dinner, played a board game, etc. I thought it would be a good way to end the unit, and DS had a blast!
We started the day as usual with our Bible study, lesson 5 in Leading Little Ones To God. It was called God Talks To Us and it answered a lot of his questions from yesterday. The lesson taught us that God talks to us a lot through the reading of His Word, the Bible. He also talks to us sometimes through His Spirit whispering in our hearts, telling us what is right and wrong and revealing His will for us.
After our Bible study, we sat down with our books that we found at the library and learned a whole lot about China. We found pictures of houses, traditional clothing, a family eating dinner, a farm with ducks, fishing boats, Chinese lanterns, calligraphy and other things related to our study. We learned how to say "Wo jiao ____" which means "My name is ____" and "Ni hao" which means "How are you?" and we decided that we wanted to learn how to write our names in Chinese, so we got online to find a Chinese language website. We discovered that the Chinese do not use "letters" like we do in our alphabet, but instead they use "characters" that stand for a whole word.
Did you know that an adult in China needs to know at least 3,000 characters in order to read a newspaper? Makes our 26 letters and accompanying sounds seem like a cinch!
We found a name generator where you can plug in the approximate sounds of the syllables in your name to get a Chinese name, complete with corresponding Chinese characters. Here's what we came up with:
DS: Bei Bao nuo
DD: Bi Ai de
DH: Bai Ren yi
Me: Bei Bao ren We found another map of China and located the Yangtze River for review. It was easier to see how long the river is in this map and DS said "You mean the river goes this far!? Wow!" and then he took it upon himself to find every other river in China and compare them to the Yangtze!
After we did this, we decided it was probably a good time to start setting up for our dinner. We hung the lanterns that we made all over the ceiling, put a blanket down on the floor, and put a tray in the middle, and some pillows on either side. We set out a plate, bowl and chopsticks for each of us.
When it was time to make our Chinese dinner, we put on our aprons and started our prep work. In China, they use a concept called mise en place, which means "everything in its place". So we did the same! We prepped everything and had it in bowls ready to put into our recipes when the time came. We boiled the chicken and diced it up, chopped carrots, water chestnuts, and garlic, and set out our bean sprouts, peas, salt, sugar, soy sauce, oil, cooking spray and cornstarch. We pre-made white rice, beat eggs, and laid out our egg roll wrappers with a moist paper towel on top to keep them from drying out. Here is DS chopping carrots:
Then, we got to work putting it all together. We made egg rolls, egg drop soup, and fried rice. We served it with green tea, Chinese coconut cookies, and fortune cookies:
Everything was delicious!
We discussed Chinese table manners and traditions and learned how to use chopsticks. DS tried everything, but I don't think he liked much of anything except the cookies! I was so proud of him for trying!
After dinner, we read Ping one last time so DH could hear it and played a board game that we made. I found the game here if you would like to print it out and make it for your own study. You have to answer questions about the book to move forward, so it was wonderful review! DH joined us for this and it ended up being a wonderful family evening!
Our 5th day bled into a 6th as we finished up some things that we didn't get to do during the week. DS got up and watched Disney's Mulan so he could see more about the culture in China. This is one of his favorites and he's seen it a million times, but he saw it through new eyes and picked up a lot that he hasn't in the past.
Then, we made ducks out of paper plates.
I wanted to make sure we studied buoyancy for this unit since the little boat boy had a barrel on his back. I explained to DS that this kept him floating, kind of like the water wings he uses when we go to the pool. We decided to play around with this concept a bit, so we got out a bowl and filled it with waters and put different objects in it to see if they would float.
(picture to come)
Well, that concludes our study of The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese.
Next week: Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
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Posted in The Story About Ping
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Today was field trip day! We had so much fun!
We started out with Lesson 4 in Leading Little Ones To God. It was called God Talked To People Long Ago and told the story of Samuel, a little boy in the Bible whom talked to audibly. DS thought it was pretty neat that people could actually hear God and wanted to know why we can't hear him. I love that he is really thinking about things and asking good questions!
Then, we started out for our day. We had a one hour drive, so on the way we listened to Ping on tape - twice! One side of the tape had some additional educational info, so we enjoyed listening to that as well. We learned more about the fishing birds with the rings on their necks so, we heard some Chinese songs, and we learned that ducks say "guaw, guaw, guaw" in China!
Our first stop was the library to find some books about China. We found a great one that was on his level called A Family in China by Nance Lui Fyson and Richard Greenhill. The girl on the front cover is even holding a duck! Then we found a few more that were a little above his grade level, but I figured it would be a good thing to see the pictures and talk about them. I also got some books for our unit on Madeline that we will be starting next week.
Then, we had lunch with DH which was a real treat since we don't normally get to see him during the day.
After that, we picked up a friend of mine who often accompanies us on field trips. I get to enjoy a social visit with a good friend while we go on our learning adventures and she enjoys tagging along and learning new things! So, it works out nicely.
Our first stop was the Wonder Bread thrift store for a 46 cent loaf of bread. Then, we headed to the duck pond! The pond is part of a city park and is fed by a stream that runs the length of the park (and beyond). There is a nice walking path along the stream, beautiful gardens, and a huge playground for the kids. It's one of our favorite places to go. We started out at the playground so DS could burn off some energy and get in some P.E. time. Then, we headed to the pond to feed the ducks.
There are plaques all along the trail with information about the different species of ducks that live there. We stopped at each one to read about them and see if we could find that type in the water. There were about 10 different types of duck right there in that pond, plus swans, geese, seagulls, and something that looked like a turkey vulture, but we're not sure if that's what it was or not.
We even found one that looked like the adults in Ping's family!
We saw a huge white swan going "bottoms up" like Ping does in the book. I wish I would have gotten a picture of that!
Then, we headed to a local Thai market. Unfortunately, there isn't a Chinese market around, but I figured this would be close enough! DS got to see all the different foods that are in an Asian diet and he got to see the Chinese writing firsthand. He even got to hold a king mackerel! It was frozen, but it still had its head, eyes and everything! EW! He really got a kick out of that!
We ended up purchasing some chopsticks, some egg roll wrappers, and some Chinese cookies for our dinner that we will be making to finish up our unit.
That evening, after dinner, we learned how to make Chinese lanterns. We were having so much fun we couldn't stop! I think we made one for every color of construction paper we had! We will use these to decorate for our dinner tomorrow night.
At bedtime, I read aloud the next chapter in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Tomorrow we'll catch up a bit with math, science, and reading practice.
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Posted in The Story About Ping
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Today we started with the third lesson in Leading Little Ones To God entitled We See God's Works. DS learned that even though we can't see God, we can see all of the things he has given us and we can see evidence of our blessings in the world around us.
We read Ping once again and he doesn't seem to mind that this is the 3rd day in a row that we have read the same book! We looked up 1 Peter 2:13-20 and talked about the importance of obeying authority. We discussed how God is our ultimate authority and we always have to do His will. We can find His will for our life by praying, studying His Word, and always being ready to do what He tells us is best.
For math today, we cut used little pictures of ducks to represent Ping's family. We grouped them according to the book: Ping, his mother, his father, his 2 sisters, 3 brothers, 11 aunts, 7 uncles, and 42 cousins. Then, we added them all up for a grand total of 68 family members! Here's a picture of the chart we made:
Sorry it's sideways, but you get the idea!
We then moved onto Literature and learned about "repetition" as a literary device. We found that Marjorie Flack listed Ping's family 6 times in the book!
In Art, we learned that illustrators can sometimes have use a "unifying theme" in their artwork. Kurt Wiese included the Yangtze River in all but 3 of the illustrations, showing that the river is very important and central to the lives of those living there.
In Science today, we learned about ducks! Fun! We learned that they sometimes sleep while standing on one leg with their bill tucked under their feathers. We learned that they "waddle" when they walk and they have webbed feet to help them swim faster. We learned that after a mama duck lays eggs, she loses all of her feathers and her ability to fly, so she has to hide in the grasses with her nest to stay out of sight of predators. We looked at pictures of about 20 different species of ducks - did you know there were that many different kinds of ducks? We do now!
For Reading practice, DS read A Funny Way To Help in Friends Old And New. His comprehension is excellent!
I also read Chapter 7 of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at bedtime. DS is so funny because he has seen the movie enough times to know what will happen, but he is on the edge of his bed every night waiting to see if Charlie is going to get one of the golden tickets!
Tomorrow is field trip day! Stay tuned!
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Posted in The Story About Ping
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It was a very cold and lazy morning, so we all snuggled in bed until about 9:15, just talking and laughing. Isn't that one of the best things about homeschooling? We can just go with the flow, playing and snuggling when our kids need it the most!
We started school around 11:00 after eating breakfast and finishing chores. We began with Lesson Two of Leading Little Ones To God, entitled We Cannot See God. This was a great lesson and explained very well that God is all spirit, with no body like we have. It referenced the story about Moses where God hid him between two rocks and passed by to give him a very small glimpse of His glory. DS was amazed when we read the part about Moses' face shining as bright as the sun when he came down from the mountain!
Then, we read The Story About Ping for the second time, and I think he liked it even more this time! He shouted out the master's call every time we got to that part...so funny! We read the story of Jonah from another children's book we found in our home library. It was neat to find the parrallels between Ping and Jonah. Like Ping, Jonah tried to run away and hide from his Master, but because of his disobedience, he faced fear, loneliness, and danger. In the end, they both ended up having to still do the very thing that they were running from and face the consequences of disobedience. This opened up a good discussion about doing what is right and facing up to the punishments of our wrong actions.
Then we had a short literature lesson in "fiction" vs. "non-fiction". We focused on what a fiction book is (a story out of the author's imagination) and how a lot of fiction books start with "Once upon a time", just like Ping and the short story DS wrote yesterday. So, back we went to our home library on a quest to find "fiction" books! Believe it or not, we could only find one other one that started with "Once upon a time" and we have a lot of books! This was good, though, because it forced DS to think about each book to determine if it was fiction or not. He did a good job and I think he understands this terminology now. He's also learned "author" and "illustrator" this week.
We decided to move onto a geography lesson. We looked up where China is on a world map and I showed him how it's all the way across a large ocean. Then, we looked at a smaller country map of China. We found the Yangtze river and DS traced it with a yellow marker, since Ping tells us that the water in the river is yellow. We talked about how the river is the 3rd largest in the whole world, with 350 million people living on it, and in some places it is so wide that you can't see the opposite shore. Since we just got home from the beach, he was able to use that as a comparison. We also looked up an American flag and a Chinese flag online and talked about how every country has a flag to represent it. DS colored a flag of China printout for our lapbook that we will put together over the weekend.
We moved onto penmanship after this and DS finished what he started on Day One. The two sentences he had to write were:
"They play in it." "They have webbed feet."
He did a really good job and he's getting better at letter placement and spacing in between his words when he is copying from another source. He added the picture in the frame above the writing. It's upside down, but it's 3 ducks in a pond with a yellow sky and a tree at the top. We are really enjoying using Draw Write Now for handwriting and learning to draw.
For math, we got out our Saxon K book and manipulatives. We used linking cubes to create ABB color patterns and to review one-to-one correspondence. Then, with the teddy bear counters, we worked on ordinal placement from first to fourth. Here's a picture of him using the teddy bear counters:
For reading practice, DS read the second story in Friends Old And New entitled Tim's Haircut.
For Art, we looked through Ping and studied the different ways that the illustrator gave the illusion of water: reflections, ripples, and movement lines. Then, using the book as a reference, DS tried his hand at drawing water. He used colored pencils and did a great job imitating the work of Kurt Wiese:
In Science, we learned about reflecting light, to tie in with the reflections on the water in the book. We filled the sink with water and looked at our own reflections in the water. Then, we laid a large mirror on the floor and put objects on top to see their reflections. We talked about how a reflection is light bouncing off of a shiny surface. We demonstrated this by placing a hand mirror into the sun and watching the light bounce off onto the wall. DS thought this was great fun and played with the mirror for about 15 minutes! Isn't it great that we can have so much fun as homeschoolers? In a public school, he would never have the opportunity to just play around with a science experiment in order to learn more about it. I love to see him enjoying learning!
We have been reading Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl as a read-aloud, so we finished our day with Chapter 6. DS loves this book and it's helping with his listening skills, since I ask him questions when the chapter is over.
Click here to see a fun "Chocolate" mini-unit I did with DS last week!
That's it for Day 2, can't wait for Day 3!
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Posted in The Story About Ping
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I think we had a good start today!
We got started right at 10:00 and did the first lesson in Leading Little Ones To God by Marian M. Schoolland. The lesson was about "faith" and how that means believing in something we can't see.
Then, we moved into reading The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack for the first time. DS loved it! He kept asking, "And what happened next!?"
After we read the story, we talked about how sometimes things look like a good thing, but really they're not. Just like Ping went after the rice cake crumb trail, but got snatched up by a boy whose family wanted to eat him for dinner! We talked about "Stranger Danger" and how sometimes bad people try to give little kids things that look good so that they can grab them and take them away from their parents. How do you teach this without scaring your children to death?
Then, we read about Solomon in 1 Kings 3:9 and we said a prayer asking God for a discerning heart, the wisdom to know what is right and what is wrong.
We decided after this "hefty" discussion to move onto something a little more light hearted, so we delved into art. We talked about how colored pencils were the medium used to draw the illustrations in the book. We examined the pictures carefully to see how the illustrator, Kurt Wiese, used combinations of colors to create different colors and shades. We made a fun discovery through our observations: It looks like he only used red, blue, and yellow pencils throughout the whole book, but with different combinations of these colors, he created green, orange, and even different shades of brown! Fun!
We took this a step further and got out our own colored pencils. Just using red, blue, and yellow, DS drew a picture of SpongeBob Squarepants, and was so excited when he figured out how to make brown!
For language arts, I had DS write his own short story that began with "Once Upon A Time". He decided to make his story correspond with his picture, so he wrote about...what else?...SpongeBob Squarepants! Ha! Can you tell he's 6?
His story went like this:
SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: THE HASH-SIGHING SLASHER
"Once upon a time there was a little sponge name SpongeBob and he works at the Krusty Krab and Squidworth told a story about the Hash-Sighing Slasher. It was about the light was turning on and off. The End"
Okay, so when I said "short" story, he took that very literally! It was supposed to be "hash-slinging", not "hash-sighing", but at least he knew what he meant. He took this straight from a SpongeBob episode, so you may recognize where he was coming from if you happen to have a son this age!
When he writes, he still doesn't leave spaces between his words (although we've been working on this for months) and he wants to write in all capital letters (because that's easier), so I let him get away with it when he writes a story (for now), but we're working on these things in Penmanship.
Actually, that moves us into Penmanship. I was so excited because we just happened to get our Draw Write Now: Book 1 by Marie Hablitzel and Kim Stitzer in the mail right before it was time to move onto handwriting practice! I love these books and have been wanting to order one for some time, so I finally just bit the bullet and did it! I wasn't disappointed and DS loved his first lesson (well, half of it!)
I started out by letting him find the "duck" page and he practiced drawing ducks for about 15 minutes. He loved how it showed him step-by-step how to draw and it made it easy for him to copy. Then, I got out the work book that came with the instructional book and asked him to copy the first two sentences into the workbook. They were:
"Ducks like the water." "They swim in it."
DS hates writing when he has to follow the rules and do it correctly, so I stopped there and we'll do the next two sentences tomorrow. Then, he asked if he could draw the picture at the top, which is what I was going to have him do anyway, so he started on that. After about 10 minutes he got frustrated because colored pencils don't have the "coverage" that crayons do. Well, we'll finish that tomorrow, too!
At this point we took a much-needed break for lunch.
After lunch, I gave him some free time and then we delved into Science. Today we decided to learn about "Water Safety". I just happened to have the Health, Safety, and Manners 1 book from A Beka, so we read pgs.51 & 52 entitled Safety in the Water. Then, we made this chart and hung it on our school room wall:
DS cut out pictures of water and water-related things in old Highlights magazines and added some stickers to decorate the poster. I still think that good old-fashioned cutting and pasting is an excellent way to work on fine-motor skills.
Now we decided to snuggle up on the couch for his reading practice. I have an old Dick and Jane beginning reader textbook called Friends Old And New that has about 40 short stories in it that we will be working through for his reading. When we finish that, we'll move onto something a little more challenging. Today we read the first story, The Lost and Found Tree. He grumbled about it at first, but at the end, he said he couldn't wait to read the next story tomorrow!
For math, we did a couple of Saxon K lessons. We're doing more than one per day because most of them are very easy for him and we're just working through this one as a basis for Saxon 1. We're hoping to start that after Christmas break. One day, we did a whole 2 weeks worth of lessons in one day because we were having so much fun!
That's it for Day 1, but it left us excited for Day 2!
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