Five in a Row: Thoughts on week 1

Well, mostly a week. Only because we are only doing 3-4 in a row instead of 5 with FIAR. Because we have co-op on Mondays and Friday is playgroup/field trip day and schooling a 5th grader at the same time, I am taking it easy with the boys. So in my last blog post, I posted what we did day 1 and what the next two day's plans were. Now that we are done with those last 2 days, thought I would update with what we actually did and what we thought of everything.

We all really love FIAR. I love it so much that I wish I had done it with Madison. And I thought about Beyond Five in a Row, their curriculum for older kids, however we have already invested a lot in this years curriculum. While doing todays lessons with the boys, Madison had her headphones on doing some of her work. I was actually wishing she was in on what we were learning because it was interesting and I thought she would like it as well, so I had her stop her work.

One thing that I like about FIAR is that you can make it as simple or as complex as you would like. They suggest one subject a day, which would keep it pretty simple. I found that not nearly enough and did a lot more, such as doing some subjects several times instead once. But I ended up trying to do way too much in one day. So maybe they know what they are talking about ;). I had a hard time stopping myself, partly because there are so many great resources online for FIAR. This was only our first book, PING, and as soon as I googled my keywords for it, I found so many things that I didn't know which ones to choose. What I love is that with FIAR, you get to pick and choose exactly what you do but the manual guides you with ideas and discussion questions, but the actual gathering and planning of those things is up to you. That's the part that I have a love/hate relationship with. It's really cool being able to pick the things you know your kids will love to teach them specific things. It's really time consuming having to go through everything to find things you know your kids will love to teach them specific things!

When Madison was in 1st grade, we did KONOS, another unit studies. It was quite different though, you didn't do a book unit study every week, but a theme, such as the middle ages over a longer period of time (I can't remember, maybe 6 weeks?). KONOS was great, but after one semester, I decided that was far too much work for me. This feels a bit easier, simpler. Madison and I both got tired of our KONOS units before the time was over. With 3-5 days, this seems like something we wouldn't burn out on.

I especially like all the little rabbit trails we went on this week. We start with reading a book about a duck and end up learning all how to cook bamboo. If anyone doesn't particularly care for something we are learning about, wait 5 minutes. It keeps their interest and they get a lot of say in what we look up, within reason. After the first day, on day 2 and 3, they both asked "Is it time to do Ping work now?" at different times, in different ways. They may not love every book as much, of course, but another awesome thing is that you can skip a book if you want to and go on to the next one. I think they learned far more than they would have with what I had originally planned. And I think it's neat that nobody else's week of Ping will look like ours, you teach to your child's interest and learning style, within certain boundaries.

Day 2

We ended up working 3 hours each day, my goal was 1-2. The boys were really engaged the whole time though and asked for more. Today, after I sat a stack of 4 books that we had just read from down, Tyler asked, "Got any more books???" If you know Tyler at all, you know he has never liked me reading to him any time except bed time, he would bawl if I tried to read during the day. This week finally changed that. He has also been extremely resistant to seat work, hand writing, anything "school like." I was hoping this would change in the next year or two, by age 7, when I want to start more formal school work. I was hoping I could find something to ease him into learning, to really create a love of learning with no fighting or pressure from me. I think FIAR really fits the bill and we have ended up doing far more seat work than I expected, because he actually really wanted to do everything relating to Ping. I thought it would be a struggle do one hour of official "learning time" with him but we have done 3, and and by 3 hours, I am the one who is done. It's pretty mentally exhausting working with 2 little kids one on one for 3 hours straight.  I don't know how elementary teachers do it longer. And then go home to their own kids.  I am going to try and limit it to two next week just to make sure that by the time I work with all 3 kids one on one, it's not dinnertime. Today, by the time I was done with the boys, Madison, and lunch, it was near 4, and I still have to read history to Madison. It's hard to tell the boys we are done when they are really excited about something though. One video on you tube led to another, one article about panda's led to another, to an activity sheet, to a different subject. I need to plan a little better as well to prevent going too long or getting too far off track.

Day 3

Day 1

I had a plan beforehand, but this what we did this week:

Each day we read PING, did Math-U-See, Reading Reflex and Hooked on Phonics Handwriting, Health, Safety and Manners lesson, Everyday Life and did our Godly character study using various sources. 

Day 1: 

Discussed running away from consequences

Discussed what fictional means, also author, illustrator, copyright, characters

Made a duck cut out craft

Learned lots about China, watched a few youtube videos about their culture, googled Yangtzee River images and fishermen.

Colored the Chinese flag

Discussed and Colored the great wall of China 

Watched video on how birds catch fish for fishermen

Learned about ducks here, went to the park to feed some, couldn’t find any, discussed the drought.

Did a ping line tracing sheet

Letter d  for duck sheet

Day 2:

Discussed and watched video about buoyancy that they really enjoyed 

Filled bowl with water and tested different items for buoyancy

We used a little mini figure guy and an am empty play-doh can to test them separately and then tied them together, to demonstrate why the boy was tied to a barrel. 

colored in ducks representing Ping’s family

Connect the dots to 30 activity sheet

Learn to Draw a duck activity sheet

Day 3:

I gave this day and loose plan, knowing I wanted to see where their interest took us, but knowing it would be somewhere.  

We got the children’s pictorial atlas  (love this book) and looked up China, discussed the landscape, the animals, ect.

Read some interesting facts about China, like paper was invented there and kept secret a while. Tyler also liked that gunpowder was discovered in China. They want to have pet panda. 

Looked up pandas, read about them and googled images using a few sites including this one  and learned that they eat mostly bamboo and why they are endangered.

Tyler asked if people can eat bamboo, so we googled and found this video of a guy cooking bamboo, eating it with a bowl he made out of bamboo with the bamboo chopsticks,. Pretty cool. 

 Let the boys pick an activity sheet, they chose a Lego theme panda

The boys saw me looking at minecraft printables on teacherspayteachers and went nuts. They picked out their own color by number pages and had fun doing them. They were so proud of their finished pages. 

Day 4 the kids were still talking about Ping, Panda's, China and other random things we had talked about. We went out for chinese for lunch and they all 3 used chopsticks, rather haphazardly. Tyler wanted to know if Panda's were mean to people like other bears, we looked up more about their behavior, watched videos of the being both cute and mean and talked more about what "endangered species" means. Friday's are a half/free day kind of day around here. I do housework, we have playgroup, maybe grocery shop, maybe do a little school but nothing that takes too much work for me, as it's my catch up day on everything else. That evening about 10pm, Tyler came to me and said "Can we do another lesson so I can learn more?" I couldn't believe my reluctant learner was so excited to learn! So we watched videos on youtube, with his favorite being the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom video, he also thinks the videos about the naughty little toddler, David, are hilarious. We watched others on the alphabet and short bedtime stories.

Saturday night, I looked up movies on netflix that related to China. Sunday we watched "Wild China" and we all loved it, it was beautiful! I have several more on my list to watch tonight.