How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA

I'll be honest, it's November... and I'm just now getting around to posting what the kids and I were up to over the Fourth of July!

Last year, we read (and LOVED) the picture book, How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman. So for the fourth, we couldn't wait to dive into Priceman's sequel, How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the USA!

This delightful book takes us along on the journey of a young baker and her little dog as they travel the United States in search of all the materials they'll need to create their own baking tools to make a cherry pie.

The book highlights a handful of states which was a great opportunity for us to learn about those states. To do that, I had a U.S. map on hand along with an atlas in which we read about each state the book mentions.

We also used this United States coloring book which I actually don't let the kids color in. : ) I make two copies of whatever page we're wanting to color (one for E, one for R), so that we can use the same coloring pages in the future. We'll be studying the states for years, I'm sure, to come!

A wooden puzzle map of the United States like this one is a really great toy to have around... and it was perfect for learning the geography and capitols of the United States.

We explored national landmarks and symbols too. First, to learn what a symbol is, we made these booklets bought here on Teachers Pay Teachers.

So the kids could play with some of our national symbols, I ordered these Supertoob USA figurines from Amazon. To learn all about them, we ordered the book O, Say Can You See.

Of course we had to bake a cherry pie!

And we watched several videos online while exploring this book, specifically to learn all about the various materials the book's main character was gathering across the United States to make baking tools like coal, cotton, clay and granite. Those links, along with many other ideas to explore this book, can be found on my Pinterest board.

It's November 20th... should I say Happy Thanksgiving, or Happy Fourth?!

Summer Reading - The Borrowers

We're in the first week of our summer break and to kick things off, E, R, and I are reading the imaginative, whimsical and beloved book The Borrowers by Mary Norton. It's the first in a series of Borrowers books and I'm especially loving it because along with E and R, it's my maiden voyage into the Borrower world!

During the school year, most if not all of the books we read (fictional and non-fictional) are both obviously and subliminally educational. They are Newbury and Caldecott Award Winning types of books with depths of historical, geographical, literary, relational and character treasures to explore. I LOVE these books. But I also love the idea of taking the opportunity that is summer to read through some simpler types of books. Not simpler as in less special. Not simpler as in less well written.

I'm talking about stories in which the goal of being engaged is exactly that. To be engaged. Not to necessarily try and glean anything in particular, educational or not, from the book. But reading for the purpose of enjoyment. Imagining the world the author offers, conjuring up images of the interesting, perhaps quirky or often memorable characters, laughing when something's funny, pausing when something's sad, wondering and questioning about why a character did or didn't do a certain something, placing yourself within the pages as your heart and mind allow.

This is an important goal, I think, for those award-winning books as well, those more outright educationally-minded stories we gladly engage with during the school year. But there's something about not having to learn anything from a book, including with your kids. But rather, existing together inside of it, just enjoying it, as you go.

With that in mind, E, R, and I have stepped happily into the Borrowers. Six-year-old E could read this by herself, but I wanted the adventure to be shared by all three of us so, for that reason, I'm reading the book aloud. Perhaps like your kids, mine need something to do with their wiggles while I read, so besides having quiet toys on hand for them to fiddle with (like legos, blocks, snap circuits and play-doh), I printed out these Borrowers coloring pages as well.

I also prepared an especially fun activity for them to do one morning as I read. If you know the story, you know that the Borrowers are tiny people who live under the house of "normal-sized" humans and everything they have - their furniture, food, clothes, etc. - is borrowed from the people who live above. So to give the kids an opportunity to engage with the book in a more hands-on way, they crafted Borrowers houses of their own!

All I did to prepare this activity was to gather a bunch of little things I had laying around, got out some glue and told them ready, set, go!

The brown boxes you see above served as the Borrowers' houses. I found them for a couple of dollars each at our local craft store. You could, instead, use a shoebox, you could tape some card stock together to make the basic shape of a room or house, really anything would work.

Some of the items the kids had to choose from included stamps (which, in the book, the Borrowers use as paintings on their walls), corks, spools, pom poms, bottle caps, feathers, paper clips, jingle bells, scrabble tiles, buttons, popsicle sticks, clothes pins, felt, yarn and ribbon. It was fun to watch what E and R came up with. Poms became chairs, spools turned into tables, clothes pins were seesaws, feathers served as beds. I loved to watch their minds and hands at work!

We still have half the book to go but reading with my kids - for the pure enjoyment of reading with my kids - is, I have a feeling, going to be the best part of summer.

If you've read the Borrowers, or decide to join us in their world, please do let us know!

Happy summer and happy reading!

Down Down the Mountain

The kids and I just finished spending some time in the old and endearing book Down Down the Mountain by Ellis Credle.

 

It's the story of a brother and sister living simply along the Appalachian Mountains in the early 1900's. They've never had money for shoes, so they grow some turnips in hopes of selling them in town and making enough to finally buy some shoes. As they make their journey "down down the mountain," they end up giving all but one turnip away to people they meet in need. And you'll have to read the book to find out what happens next!

As I've learned from the wonderful book workshop company LitWits (which, if you haven't already checked out, you should!), books are especially meaningful for kids when their senses are engaged. Which is what, as usual, I tried for. So here's what we did!

After reading the book for the first time, we looked into where the Appalachian Mountains are using a map (shown above) I found for free online and printed out. To learn a bit more about mountains in general, we also flipped through these mountain nomenclature cards and played around with these mountains 3-part cards which taught us the five different kinds of mountains and gave real life examples of each.

We also had several books on mountains sitting out. And the poem you see in the photo above is called General Store by Rachael Field which I printed out since the kids in the book visit an early 1900's general store.

Down Down the Mountain was also a great opportunity to visit a local farm with some friends and see firsthand how fruits and vegetables (including turnips!) are grown.

E, R, and I also talked about the difference between fruits and vegetables (anything with a seed is a fruit!). And we reviewed the food pyramid by sorting various kinds of foods into groups. We used some wooden food we had on hand for that, in addition to this sorting activity found on Twinkl. (The poem, Cauliflower Fluffy, shown below, can also be found there.)

The kids in the book ate cornbread, and although my kids had already had cornbread, I bought some at the store (baking is not my biggest gift!) for us to nosh on.

Here's what our Down Down the Mountain setup looked like:

Feel free to check out my pinterest board for lots more Down Down the Mountain ideas!

The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar

We just wrapped up a week of engaging with, and enjoying, the beautifully illustrated and written picture book The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. It was R's "preschool book" as we call it which was perfect for him because he's pretty intrigued by horses. (We do one "preschool book" every one or two weeks in addition to the separate unit studies we do for my 6-year-old, E. R loves having something that's specifically for him even though the three of us do it all together and E gets as much as if not more from these preschool books than the preschooler probably does!).

The book is set on the island of Sweetbriar in Massachusetts so after reading the book for the first time, one of our first activities was to learn a bit about the state by finding it on the globe - first we found North America, then the U.S., then Massachusetts. As we often do when learning about a state, we colored the appropriate state page in the Dover United States Coloring Book. I print out two copies of the page, one for R, one for E, and we don't actually color in the book so that we can keep re-using the pages as we study states in the future.

I also had the Massachusetts state card out from a U.S. flash cards set like this one. I printed out a small picture of the region in which the story takes place and had a couple of books on horses on hand too that we checked out from the library. It's not shown in my photo but my favorite was Horses! by Gail Gibbons because like most of Gibbons' books, it's extremely thorough, easy for kids to understand and has bright, colorful, interesting and informative pictures.

I'm such a fan of three part cards, so to learn the basic anatomy of a horse, we used these horse nomenclature cards.

We already had this horse placemat on hand which shows many breeds of horses and both R and E had fun matching the photos on the placemat with these horse magnets I'd found at the thrift store a while back.

As we often do, we put together this FREE lapbook on all we were learning. E was especially eager to put together this "Horsing Around with Homophones" book as well.

All week, we had out this folding horse stable I found at a garage sale last year along with a handful of horse figurines so that kids could simply play. And usually, we would have topped off our study with a trip to see some horses, maybe even to ride and groom and feed them. But only a couple of weeks prior, we'd already done something similar. : )

Have you read The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar?

What have you done to study horses that you can share?

Feel free to check out my Wild Horses of Sweetbriar board on Pinterest for more ideas!

The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge

I used to collect lighthouses when I was a kid. I'm not sure why, or if perhaps someone else started my lighthouse collection for me and then it just grew... and grew and grew. We've donated many a lighthouse to Goodwill over the years as we've taken (baby) steps to clean out our garage. But I do still like lighthouses which is only one reason I really liked this book: The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by Hildegarde H. Swift and Lynd Ward.

It's the true story of a still-existent lighthouse on the shores of the Hudson River in New York. The account, beautifully told, tells the story from the lighthouse's point of view as a great gray bridge (The George Washington Bridge) is built overhead. This book is not only a great story, wonderfully told, but an opportunity rich in content to unearth.

We spent a couple of weeks with this book and here's some of what we explored:

New York. First we checked the U.S. map to see where New York is along with which states surround it. We learned it's capital and this was a fun book to get to know the state.

We also learned about the Hudson River, mainly looking at photos of the river from a book I found at the library.

We studied rivers in general with this river nomenclature book.

And visited a nearby river to stomp around in - and throw rocks in! - ourselves.

We also looked at what kinds of animals live in and around rivers. We used this book for that. And I love TOOB, so I had TOOB river animals sitting out which the kids played with over the course of our study. I put the river animals on a blue silky scarf which I surrounded with small rocks, sticks and moss (I took photos but can't find them!). Nearby was a lighthouse the kids made out of an upside down red plastic cup with a battery-operated tea light on top (Dollar Store) and a smaller clear plastic cup upside down on top of that. I so wish I could find those pictures so you could see! : )

We did learn about lighthouses as well. I like Gail Gibbons' book Beacons of Light.

And here's some video from the little red lighthouse itself!

We also studied bridges. We watched this great video about painting the George Washington Bridge. Then we explored the four main types of bridges with this book. The book has more ideas for bridge building projects than I was ready to do at this point with my 3 and 6 year olds. But we did do one of the many suggested activities, and that was to try and build the four basic types of bridges with books, paper and materials around the house to see which structure is strongest.

Our unit was complete with a weekend trip to the Golden Gate Bridge.

We also hope to visit a lighthouse sometime soon. Pictures will follow (if I don't lose them first!). : )

Feel free to check out my Pinterest Board for more ideas! https://www.pinterest.com/shelleypimentel/

The Day the Crayons Quit

Drew Daywalt and Oliver Jeffers make a great team in their big hit book The Day the Crayons Quit. What a cute, and funny, story!

E, R, and I had a blast reading, then re-reading, the book over the course of a week. And in that week, we also learned about color!

Being a bright 6, E already knew a lot about color, including primary and secondary colors and color mixing. But being 6, I knew she'd also still have fun playing with these ideas while her younger brother R explored them for the very first time.

To do that, we also had these books on hand:

The Color Kittens
White Rabbit's Color Book

And we had an assortment of hands-on color activities laying around too:

Kids Color Mixing Set (which has about a dozen ideas and materials for hands-on coloring mixing fun)
Color Wheel
Color Mixing Posters (which I cut out, put Velcro on and made into an interactive color mixing activity)

In The Day the Crayons Quit, the crayons write letters to their owner, complaining about various things. So we also took this opportunity to learn about letter writing. We used this for that.

Feel free to check out my Pinterest Board for more ideas: https://www.pinterest.com/shelleypimentel/

There's a sequel coming out in August, The Day the Crayons Came Home. Can't wait!

Elmer

Earlier this year I discovered the website twinkl which I highly recommend. It has loads of resources for all age groups, some of which are free. I ordered the one-year subscription which gives access to all the site's resources and it's been more than worth it. One of the treasures I uncovered on twinkl is the picture book series Elmer by author David McKee. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before!

Elmer is an adorable patchwork elephant with an absolute heart of gold. Over the course of a week, E, R and I went through three Elmer books (starting with the first in the series... there's no particular order after that). Twinkl has tons of Elmer resources including coloring sheets, printables and activities. We utilized all that twinkl has to offer and, to learn specifically about elephants, I bought these three things (all from Teachers Pay Teachers):

Elephants Mini Unit
Elephants Thematic Unit
Elephant Nomenclature Book

I like Teachers Pay Teachers because the products are all handmade by actual teachers and they're really inexpensive for the amount of time buying their products saves me. It also puts a few bucks in fellow teachers' pockets! : )

To end our Elmer week, we took a field trip to a nearby zoo with some friends and the kids had the chance to feed carrots to an African elephant, Butch! Beforehand, we made elephant-shaped cookies (the cookie cutter was bought on Amazon), to share with our friends on the drive there.

Check out my Pinterest Board for more ideas! https://www.pinterest.com/shelleypimentel/

The Duchess Bakes a Cake

We've clicked the clock back a few notches for the past couple of weeks exploring Medieval Times with Virginia Kahl's The Duchess Bakes a Cake!

It's the story of a bored mother and duchess in the Middle Ages who decides to try her hand at baking. But her cake goes terribly wrong requiring the whole kingdom to step in. The book is darling and a great opportunity to dive into all things medieval, including castles, knights, peasants and war!

We used two different (but related) lapbooks as our guide:

This FREE Knights and Castles Lapbook and this FREE Knights Lapbook.

To gather the information we needed to complete the lapbooks, here are some of the great and fun and interactive books we used:

Ms. Frizzle's Adventures: Medieval Castle
Medieval Life (DK Eyewitness Books)
Look Inside a Castle (Lift the Flap Book)
A Year in a Castle
You Wouldn't Want to be a Medieval Knight!

We also checked out Days of Knights and Damsels: An Activity Guide from the library and did a couple of the creative projects, including writing in calligraphy and making marbled paper.

The kids then wrote notes to their Grammy on the paper...

I had some wooden blocks on hand throughout this unit so the kids could build, the re-build, castles...

And because the big problem the duchess encountered in Kahl's book was an overabundance of yeast, we did this yeast experiment. Look at E's face!

Of course we had to bake a cake. I'm a cake-from-the-box kind of gal but we did add some fresh strawberries and homemade whipped cream to top off it off. Mmmmm mmm!

Have you read this book?

What else have you done (and enjoyed!) to study Medieval Times?

Don't forget to check out my Pinterest Board for more ideas! https://www.pinterest.com/shelleypimentel/

Roxaboxen

Who knew rocks, with a bunch of boxes, could be so fun?

E, R, and I recently spent some time with a sweet, playful and inspiring story called Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran. The author lets us in on when her mother was a child and how, in Arizona, she and her neighbors made a unique and special kids-only space called, you guessed it, Roxaboxen.

E and R had a great time building their own Roxaboxen in our backyard - with rocks and also cardboard boxes pulled out from our garage. It was also a great opportunity to learn all about Arizona, the desert and rocks!

Here's what our set-up looked like for the week:

To learn a bit about Arizona, we used an Atlas we had on hand along with this coloring book (which is a great resource to learn the very basics about each U.S. state for only $5!).

To learn about rocks, we read Let's Go Rock Collecting which, among other things, taught us about the three main categories of rocks. To learn about the rock cycle, we used this FREE infographic. I had this rock and mineral collection already on hand so that, with a magnifying glass, my kids could explore and even identify some rocks.

I love TOOB, so on top of some sandpaper to resemble the desert, I had these TOOB desert figurines. The kids loved to play with them throughout the week. As always, I had a handful of books from our local library available on our topic so that when we had a down moment, we could pull one out and read some more.

The last thing we did for Roxaboxen was to make a couple of desert art projects. They came from this great habitat project book. The kids made a pickleweed cactus painting and a big-horned sheep with toilet paper rolls and paper plates.

Have you read Roxaboxen?

Also, what have been some of your especially great resources to learn about deserts and/or rocks?

Feel free to check out my Pinterest Board for more Roxaboxen ideas! https://www.pinterest.com/shelleypimentel/