The Duchess Bakes a Cake
The last thing we did for school before Nicholas was born (over a month ago already!) was to row The Duchess Bakes a Cake from Five in a Row Vol. 3. It is such a fun book! This is another one of those wonderful stories I’d never had the pleasure of reading before discovering Five in a Row. We loved the rhythm, the rhymes, the medieval setting, and of course the fun story. There’s something special about a book that leads your 3-year old to request some “lovely, light, luscious, delectable cake” for dessert. (We made an angel food cake to enjoy along with our “row” all week.)
Aside from doing a number of lessons in the FIAR Vol. 3 manual (talking about alliteration, doing the action drawing tracings, and watching the chemical reaction of baking soda and vinegar were among our favorites), we spent a couple weeks enjoying anything we could find related to medieval times. We revisited many of the activities, songs, poems, books, etc. that I had collected when we did our unit on Knights, Castles, and the Armor of God. (I won’t waste time relisting them again, but check out that post because we had a lot of fun both times!) Our Bible verse for the week was “Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.” Ephesians 6:10-11. Mama was extremely pregnant during this row, so the children got to watch a lot more videos than I’d normally allow, including the old Disney cartoon Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Bob the Builder – The Knights of Fix-a-Lot (available on Netflix and streaming free for Amazon Prime members), and Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. We recently came across a reference to King Arthur and the round table so I enjoyed introducing Ian to the Arthur legend.
We just managed to get all the knight books back on the shelf, our armor back in the dress-up box, and our castle put back in its storage tub before Nicholas made his appearance a bit earlier than expected. Adjusting to having four kids age five and under has gone more smoothly than I anticipated, and we’re back into our regular school routine much sooner than I had that we’d be able to handle, so I’m looking forward to getting back to blogging more regularly!
To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.” Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.