Literature Unit: Story About Ping

We recently 'rowed' The Story About ping and I am only now getting around to posting about it. If you are unfamiliar with the term 'row, rowed, rowing' it was coined by FIAR and the fact that they advocate to read the same book (the book you are studying) for five days in a row......make sense?!

I have purchased the first Volume of FIAR after having completed a few of the BFIAR books with the kids over the last few years. This is a supplement, something different, not something we would do all of the time. Not because I don't feel that it isn't 'good enoough' or up to par, in fact it is a beautiful, gentle, encouraging way to learn and perfect to use in a way which brings all of the children together.

I just don't want FIAR to become same old same old, if we were to tackle it week in week out. In the end there is loads of printing and loads of cutting of mini books and whilst doing the odd lapbooking type project here and there for the kids is fun, I really don't want it to be our basis. In fact I like to change things up all the time and use a wide variety of stuff.

We are certainly not a family to purchase a curriculum and use it from Pre - 12 and I don't think we will ever do that! In saying all of that though, this was truly enjoyable and I am looking forward to rowing something again soon.

The kids had a blast and asked for the related activities several times over the span of the two weeks that we took to complete this project.

I also chose to change things and not do a traditional lapbook, we already have done a few and the thought of having to store all of those lapbooks that could possibly build up over the years was a growing nightmare. So we have done what I think is now being called a Lap n Note, a combination of a lapbooking and notebooking.

We've still used all of the little booklets, with each on a sheet of A4 cardstock, my plan is at some stage to bind these all together into one large Literature Studies Booklet. I'm still not sure if I have made the right decision on how we have put these together but my procrastination on the assembly side of things already held us up for weeks.

First it was trying to decide if we should stop doing them in the manila folders, then I had to come up with alternatives, large scrapbook/A3 sketch books were a possibility too. I think any way would work but my thoughts on the lap n note is that we can easily 'rerow' books (since K has only just turned 6 this is a high possibility) and add to our exisiting lap n notes (much more difficult to do with an already completed lapbook)

So as you look at the images you will notice that there are some blank pages (this is where I am unsure if I have made the right choices here). Anyway, I'll quit rambling so you can just scroll and look at some of the photo's.

All printables are straight from the lovely ladies at home school share and I am only showing B's as K's is very similar anyway.

I have grouped like topics/subjects together, so geography/cultural topics on china.

I always take lots of photo's so made sure that those were included. These are invaluable when tyring to show/remember hands on stuff, like the salt dough map of china and the other smaller creations (ping and a chinese flag)

Moving on to language arts, which includes poetry above and story sequencing below.

Well that's a boring photo, I probably should have opened the booklet. It is filled with small images of the story that the children had to sequence before gluing into the mini booklet. Need some more language arts activities to complete this page.

Counting Ping's family.

Extra's, like the cute carrot and celery stick Ping, B made from his snack and K loved the egg Ping toasties.

And not forgetting a bit of science, the sun mini booklet was actually from 1+1+1=1.

This is the finish and we have one lonely mini book on types of ducks, Which in one way is great as it shows exactly what we need to focus on the next time we row Ping, but what if we never get back to it, this is going to be one big glaringly boring page!

Oh well maybe we can fill it with some cute duck pictures or something.