All About Me- Math Project

For a fun math project recently we created some personalized math posters. You can click on the pictures to enlarge them. 

Our favorite part was figuring up how many days old everyone is! 

Summer Fun ~ Part 6

Natalie has been working on a doll house this summer. Here is what she has created so far. 

She is sure having fun with this project. 

Grandfather's Journey ~ {A FIAR Rowing}

Our most recent FIAR rowing was the book Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say. 

This sweet story is told by the grandson of the main character, The Grandfather. Grandfather was born in Japan but when he was a young man he came to America by ship. He traveled across America meeting people of all races and seeing vast landscapes. He ended up in California, in the city of San Francisco. It was here that he loved best. He eventually returned to Japan to marry his childhood sweetheart and they moved together to San Francisco. When he was in one place he longed for the other. Always missing his birth place but when in Japan missing his new home. He and his bride decided to return to the village of Japan for their child to be born. As grandfather grew old he longed to visit California one more time but a war broke out which prevented him from ever leaving Japan again. 

I love the contrast between cultures in this book and it is one of those books that has far more lessons than can be pulled into just one rowing. 

GEOGRAPHY: 

Of course our story disk and flag went on Japan. We talked a lot about California during this rowing since it is where Bryan and I were born and raised. We talked about the feelings that Bryan and I experienced when we first left California 18 years ago. We experienced many of the same emotions that Grandfather does in this story. When we are in one place, we long for the other. 

In our book the Sierra Mountains are mentioned so we watched a short video that shows the mountains. 

This video is pretty cool. It shows footage of the mountains taken from a plane. 

Most of our lessons on California during this rowing were conversational. Our deepest focus was on Japan and its culture. 

Here are some go-along books that we read during our rowing: 

This is a book that we have owned since the older kids were young. Every time we learn about Japan we read it. It was a favorite go-along for Ally during this rowing, for obvious reasons. :) 

I have always loved the "Look What Came From" series of books. We have quite a few of them. 

The book How My Parents Learned To Eat was a book that I checked out from the library years ago when the older kids first rowed Grandfather's Journey. It was such a hit back then that I bought it for our home library. Ally asked to read it several times. It's a very sweet book about an American soldier that meets and falls in love with a Japanese woman and how they are both shy about not knowing how the other one eats with chopsticks and forks and knives. They avoid going out to dinner together for a while because of it but finally both decide they need to learn how to eat with the others utensils so they can share a meal together. :) 

The kids decorated these Japanese kimonos for these paper dolls one day. 

We also painted some cherry blossom trees while reading about Japan. 

We started by looking at pictures of Japanese Cherry blossoms and then painting the stems of our trees. 

We then used the bottom of a water bottle dipped in pink paint to make our blossoms. 

The end result. They turned out so pretty! 

One day for lunch we made a "flag of Japan" pizza.

Ally spreading the sauce on. 

Putting the cheese on. 

All done! 

We spent one afternoon watching the following video of Big Bird in Japan. Even if your kids are older than a sesame street age, this is a fun short movie to watch. Even I enjoyed it. About an hour in length. The kids learned that "hello" in Japanese is "Ohio" just like the state here in America. :) 

Our "Look What Came From Japan" book talked about Origami so we pulled out an Origami book that we had on our shelves and did some exploring with it. 

These origami cats were a favorite. 

We also read this book and these birds were made from directions in our origami book. 

Because of all of the traveling that Grandfather did in our story we had an opportunity to review our continents. We spent one afternoon playing a board game for the continent of Asia. 

I love, love, love these games! Their is one for each continent. They are really intended for older ages but I simplified the game some for my kids when we played. You travel through the various countries on the continent using different modes of transportation. You have ten days to make it through the continent and the first one to finish their journey, wins. It's a great way to hear and learn about those far off islands and places that you never know when your watching the Olympics. *Grin* 

The kids really enjoyed playing this game. 

HISTORY: 

Our book makes reference to World War 2. It is the war that broke out that prevented Grandfather from returning to America one last time. I used this opportunity to go over what World War 2 was about with the kids. We discussed the countries that were involved in the war while looking at our world map and locating each country. We read a book about Pearl Harbor and briefly discussed the concentration camps here in America after reading another book called The Bracelet. 

This was the kids first introduction to World War 2 so we kept things pretty light. Even so, I was listening to Camden tell Bryan and one of the older kids what he had learned about World War 2 and I was a bit impressed with all he knew. I love that about FIAR. It's such a gentle yet effective way of learning. 

We placed one of Camden's army men on the date on our timeline for World War 2. Every time we learn about a new war we place an army man on that date. It's always interesting as our timeline fills up more to see how many army men are on it.  

ART: 

During this rowing we focused on a famous Japanese artist and print maker named Hokusai for our art lessons. 

This is a picture book we read about his life. He painted a lot of Japanese landscapes and is most known for his wood block prints and the painting you see here on the front of this book.

A picture in the book that shows Hokusai's famous painting, The Wave.

The back of the book has some examples of his woodcut prints. We didn't have any wood to carve paintings into to make woodcut prints but I did have some foam meat trays I had washed and saved. We used those to draw and then carve some Japanese writings into- to get an idea of how Japanese woodcut prints are made. 

 A picture from the book that showed some Japanese words. This is the picture the kids wanted to go off of for their "woodcut prints." 

To make our prints I cut our foam trays into smaller squares. The kids then drew whatever image they wanted onto their trays. We then pressed down into the foam along their drawings with the end of some scissors. I had to help with this. Our foam was pretty stiff and it was a bit hard to get the scissors to scroll over our image. A sharp knife would have probably worked better but I really didn't want to use one with the kids. We made it work. If your foam trays are softer than ours were, it probably won't be an issue. We tried just using our pen to press down into our foam over the drawings but we broke our pen. :) Once we had some good indents along our drawings the kids painted over their entire piece of foam with black paint. You do this quickly as you don't want your paint to dry before pressing your paper on it. You don't push your brush into the indents in the foam. Just put a smooth coat of paint over the foam. Then take a white piece of paper and press it down on your "block". 

And you have your print. 

The kids seemed to really enjoy this art lesson and it gave them an idea of how Japanese woodblock printing happens. Our local art museum has a great Japanese section with some Japanese woodblock prints on display. I am hoping to take the kids up there soon for a field trip. 

COPYWORK: 

The kids handwriting page for this rowing. This copywork is on top of their normal handwriting lessons. 

SOCIAL STUDIES: 

Grandfather's Journey gave us a wonderful opportunity to discuss family trees. We read the following book. 

We spent one afternoon talking about our own family tree. We discussed where everyone was born and where they currently live. This tied in so well with Grandfather's Journey since our family has California roots. :) The kids made these family trees that afternoon. 

Camden came to me later on and wanted me to come see his other family tree he had made. A monkey family tree. Here is a picture........

His monkey "family tree". :) 

LANGUAGE ARTS: 

Our book gave us several examples of similes in the writing. One was on the page that mentioned the war. The sentence said "bombs dropped from the sky and scattered our lives like leaves in a storm." We spent every day talking about what similes are, reviewing them, making up our own, and looking through the go-along books we read for any other similes we could find. I have a large collection of language arts printables that I keep on hand so that when I need some papers for a particular language arts concept, I have them. I pulled out a few of my papers from my simile stash and we used them during the week. 

Here is one sheet where the kids had to come up with some similes of their own. 

We played this simile game that I had printed. Camden kept asking to play it over and over again. He loved this. You had to match the stars to the correct like or as on the main board. 

One afternoon we made some ice cream cone crafts (just for some summer fun) and we used them afterwards to make a simile lesson for this rowing. 

The kids popsicles that they painted. We used toilet paper rolls and popsicle sticks to make these. The kids loved this! I had them do their similes separately with this lesson so that each of theirs would be original. I love the ones they came up with. 

Ally's simile about her ice cream. 

Natalie's 

Camden's. You can enlarge these pictures by clicking on them. 

The core of our lessons came from the FIAR manual and some of my ideas were things I saw on Pinterest. I have quite a few ideas for this book pinned in my FIAR folder, HERE, and my language arts folder, HERE, that we didn't use. You can also find the printables we did use in those folders. 

This was a memorable and great row for us, as they always are.