Poco Mountain Girl

Zia and I have been doing something called Five in a Row. It uses classic picture books – we’ve started with Madeline – and we read the book once each day for 5 days in a row. After each reading, we explore a different area of learning through the book.

The first day we did geography, finding France on the map, and located Paris, where Madeline lives. We made a flag of France and talked about the Seine River.

The next day we did math. I used a small pile of dry pasta, rice, and chia seeds and we played with largest, smallest, and in-between. The book says “the smallest one was Madeline”, so we assigned a chia seed for Madeline, while the other girls were the rice, and Miss Clavel was a pasta spiral.

I really love Five in a Row. My friend Caroline told me about it (and let me borrow her manual). There is also a Volume 2, but I think Vol. 1 will keep us busy for a while! I think we may tackle Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel after Madeline.

Caleb’s latest obsession happens to be a steam shovel called Bucyrus. It lives in Nederland outside the Mining Museum, and is the last remaining Bucyrus 50-B in the world. Which of course is a huge deal and has made Bucy very endeared in our home.

So much so that Caleb has leapt into the world of art in order to have a portrait of Bucyrus. I made an outline for him, which he inked and then added charcoal and Conte pencil for a rustic color finish.

The caterpillars have cocooned! It happened Saturday, and so we transferred them to their new home…

the Butterfly Habitat.

Here is a little tree house that Zia and I made for her dolls (idea from Family Fun magazine). It’s made of a cardboard box and has a system of chutes and ladders for getting upstairs and down.

Yesterday we went to Arapahoe Ridge Park for a play day with a large group of unschoolers. I forgot my camera (of course), but it was a really cool park with tunnels and burrows carved into a big rock mountain to climb on. Caleb and Zia (and I) made new friends and they played for 3 hours straight – which is a good sign of having fun, right?

On to another bright day. Firewood is being delivered, and then we’re off to Nederland to the library.

Have a great day!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 6th, 2011 at 9:56 am and is filed under Arty, Caleb, Crafts for Kids, Little Redhead Girl, Making Stuff, Reading, unschool. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.