Tag Archives: preschool curriculum

Cranberry Thanksgiving

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Like many other Five in a Row families, we spent last week (actually more like the last two) with Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin.  Ian really enjoyed the story and requested it to be read to him over and over.  For days he looked forward to making Grandmother’s cranberry bread, though he wasn’t too thrilled with the results.  (I think the problem was that our cranberries were so big and tart, you got a huge bite of sourness without enough bread.  He had opted for all cranberries instead of half raisins, so it was pretty intense.  All the adults loved it, but next time I think we’ll use the raisins and maybe use sweetened dried cranberries or at least cut the fresh ones in half.  )

  

We had a few of the discussions from the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1), but mostly we just learned about cranberry bogs and the story of Thanksgiving.  We found Cranberries by Inez Snyder at the library and read it a few times.  Ian really enjoyed watching How It’s Made: Cranberries on YouTube. (A few years later, we went back to watch that, and also really enjoyed How Does It Grow? Cranberry and its follow-up episode.) We also watched the Reading Rainbow episode “Summer.”  As it described how the cranberries are harvested, it showed a picture of the air pockets inside the berries that cause them to float.  To follow up on that, we read The Magic Schoolbus Ups and Downs: A Books About Floating and Sinking.

We spent quite a while talking about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.  Last year at this time I was only a couple weeks away from delivering Arianna, so we didn’t do a whole lot, though I had collected a number of books and printed/ laminated some activities.  This year it was so nice to pull out my Thanksgiving file and have all sorts of things to do!  We enjoyed playing with Thanksgiving dominoes and memory cards from www.dltk-cards.com.  We also did some activities from the Thanksgiving Preschool Packs at 1+1+1=1 and Homeschool Creations and Pilgrim maze.

  

Combined with the Thanksgiving Devotional we did during Bible Time each evening (see this post for more on that), a basket full of books both from our family collection and the library, and a couple Thanksgiving movies (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and William Bradford: The First Thanksgiving, both big hits that we watched over and over) I thought the boys got a pretty thorough Thanksgiving education!

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.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: Abraham is Tested

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted anything about our Bible lessons.  We’ve still been enjoying Long Story Shortby Marty Machowski, but I just really didn’t have anything additional to write about the weeks we spent on “God Rescues Lot” or “Isaac and Ishmael.”  I’m amazed at how much Ian (4 1/2) has been getting out of the nightly devotions.  Elijah (just turned 3) needs a little extra explanation, but even he has been learning a lot.  Every night as we pile on our bed for Bible time, Elijah gets a grin on his face and says, “Mommy, I know a Bible verse.”  I love the gleam in his eye as he says it.  He obviously realizes this is something important to me, and he’s excited to share.

The Gospel Story Bible: Discovering Jesus in the Old and New TestamentsI’ve mentioned before that we’re also using The Gospel Story Bible (also by Machowski).  To be honest, I wasn’t terribly impressed with it upon first glance, at least as a stand alone storybook.  However, I’ve come to really appreciate it as a part of our weekly routine.  The devotional readings in Long Story Short tend to break up the story over the course of the week.  We usually read from The Gospel Story Bible as an additional reading at the end of the week, and I love how it not only tells the whole story, but also incorporates the teaching about Jesus.  It provides a great summary and is the perfect way to close our week.

This week’s story was about Abraham being asked to sacrifice the beloved son he had waited 25 years to hold.  It led to some interesting conversations with Ian, especially about the idea of a parent loving God more than his child.  It’s easy to say this is our priority, but when we consider what God asked of Abraham we might have to do a heart check.  I know I did.  Children are such precious blessings, especially when they have been long anticipated.  I can only imagine the delight Abraham and Sarah took in watching Isaac go through each new stage as he grew up.  What amazing faith Abraham had as he set out to make the most costly sacrifice he’d ever offered to God!  (Imagine also what poor Sarah must have gone through when she heard the whole story!  I’m sure Abraham waited until after Isaac was safely home to fill her in on what God had commanded.)

As far as our lessons, we still haven’t added much as far as daytime activities other than watching two movies: Abraham and Isaac and Sodom and Gomorrah (which covers Abraham’s whole life).  We haven’t worked on any new memory verses or added anything to our Bible notebook.  Our schedule this fall just started feeling too full, but over the last week I’ve made some changes, and I’m looking forward to getting back into our regular groove.  Of course, with the holidays upon us it will probably be a while before things feel normal again.  This was actually our last week with Long Story Short until after Christmas.  Instead our Bible Time is going to be a chance to help our children view Thanksgiving and Christmas through a biblical lens.  We’ve already started talking a lot about the holidays, and I’m looking forward to spending the season soaking in the Scriptures!

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: The Lord Appears to Abraham

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Last week in our journey through Long Story Short by Marty Machowski we continued with the story of Abraham, and we finally got to throw in a few of the “extras” we’d been having fun with in the first few weeks of this year’s Bible lessons.  We watched VeggieTales: Abe & the Amazing Promise (over and over!) and taught the boys how to sing “Father Abraham” with all the motions (a great tie-in to the night where the devotional talked about how Abraham’s promised descendants included not only his natural children, but also spiritual ones who share his faith).  They ask us to do the song almost every night during Bible time, but I can only handle such pre-bedtime craziness about once a week.

We also worked on a memory verse, summing up the last few weeks with a verse from Romans: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Romans 4:3.  We got back to our reading practice by using the Bible memory verse cards I described in this post.  We also finally added another page to our Bible notebook.  (On one of our extra nights that didn’t have a devotional reading, we did a “review” and the boys went through each page of their notebooks, telling us what they remembered about that story.  Ian was excited to discover he could read all of the memory verses and begged to add another page so he could have more to read.)  I got the idea from Christian Preschool Printables, and just added a frame image and used glitter star stickers. (I had some trouble with the link to the file from the regular CPP site, but I managed to do a search and found that the links from this page work.)

  

And of course, we spent a lot of time on our “Listening Lesson”:

It was a little shorter than usual, but we’re running thin on Abraham material!  Still, as we discovered during our “review” night, both boys have been retaining a LOT of details about Abraham’s story because of how long we’re spending on it.  So I’m not going to worry about “extras” so much as we get through the rest of the story.

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Papa Piccolo

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Over the last few weeks, we’ve been rowing Papa Piccolo by Carol Talley, which I chose to complement our composer study on Vivaldi (post coming soon).  Because of that, we focused on geography and spent a lot of time learning about Venice.

Papa Piccolo tells the story of a Venetian tomcat who finds two kittens who could use someone to watch over them and teach them how to take care of themselves.  The illustrations by Itoko Maeno are wonderful watercolor paintings of what many consider the most beautiful city in the world.  Both my boys were enchanted by the story and enjoyed reading it over and over.

Here are the things we did in addition to covering many of the activities in the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1):

  • We talked about the main character’s name, looking at a picture of a piccolo and listening to Vivaldi’s Piccolo Concerto on the Daydreams and Lullabies CD from Classical Kids
  • We watched a Wonder Pets half-episode called “Save the Kitten” about a kitten in Venice (it’s the 2nd half of the episode, starting at 12:15 if you don’t want to watch the first one), available streaming on Netflix or Amazon Instant Video (free for Prime members).  The Little Einsteins episode “How We Became the Little Einsteins” features paintings of Venice. (They also visit Venice in “The Birthday Machine” on the Mission Celebration DVD.  (We also watched The Aristocats, which has nothing to do with Venice but was a fun story about tomcat who helps a group of kittens and their mother.)
  • Ian and I both enjoyed watching Ancient Mysteries – Miraculous Canals of Venice
    on Netflix as we folded laundry one morning.  (This was fascinating for me and would be great for older kids!)
  • We read Zoe Sophia’s Scrapbook: An Adventure in Venice by Claudia Mauner and Elisa Smalley, which has a lot of great information about Venice.  I also had a Kindle book called The Canals of Venice that I had picked up a few months back when it was free
  • Finally, Ian really enjoyed seeing pictures of a friend and me on our trip to Venice back in our single days.  I told him about how a pigeon pooped on my jacket in the Piazza San Marco (where Papa Piccolo likes to watch the birds), and he mentioned it every time we saw the square in books or videos after that.

  

There are several places to see gondolas in action around Southern California, and I had hoped to take the kids out one evening to see them, but then sickness hit and it just didn’t seem like a great idea to spend an evening outside.  Someday I hope we’ll get to do that, and when we do I know the kids will we looking out for Marco, Polo, and Papa Piccolo!

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.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: God Gives Abram a New Name

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“Never imagine you have rightly grasped a biblical idea until you have reduced it to a corollary of the idea of covenant.”*  When I was in college, one of our mandatory classes was “Theology of Ministry.”  Everyone was required to memorize this quote, and though it’s been more than fifteen years, it was so drilled into my mind that I can still remember it almost word-for-word.  As we spent yet another week on Abraham this quote came to my mind.  God’s covenant with Abraham was one of the most important events in the Bible.  If I were to sum up the major events of God’s whole “Grand Story” as told through the Bible, I would put it this way:

  1. God created the world as a place for his masterpiece, mankind, with whom He wanted to live in relationship.
  2. Mankind rejected God’s authority, believed the lie of the Enemy, and consequently caused sin to enter the world.
  3. Although sin separated man from God, He had a plan to redeem His Creation: He promised that someday He would send a Savior to crush the Enemy.
  4. Out of a world now ruled by sin, God chose one man, Abraham, who trusted in Him.  Because of Abraham’s faith, God made a covenant with him, promising to bless his family and from them to bring forth the Savior through whom he would bless all the families of the earth.
  5. Abraham’s family became a nation, Israel, the first to be “God’s people.”  Although they did not always follow him faithfully, through His relationship with Israel God revealed His nature: slow to anger, abounding in love, rich in grace.
  6. When the time was right, God sent the Savior, Jesus, who conquered sin and death.  Those put their trust in Him are grafted into “God’s people.”
  7. Jesus ascended to heaven, but someday he will return to fully establish His kingdom, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, where God’s original intention will be fulfilled, and His people will live with Him for all eternity.

The story looks bleak until God’s plan is put into action, when He makes His covenant with Abraham.  This week in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski we talked about God changing Abram’s name to Abraham, which means “father of a multitude,” telling him, “I have made you the father of a multitude of nations” (Genesis 17:5).  His wife, Sarai, who has spent decades lamenting her barrenness, is told that “she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her” (Genesis 17:16). I wonder what it must have been like to be Abraham and Sarah.  God has promised them something so incredible: not just the baby they have ached for and long since accepted as an impossibility given their advanced ages, but a major role in the Grand Story, one that encompasses all of history, from Creation to eternity.  I think they must have borne their new names with a sense of humility and awe.

I love that Long Story Short is making me consider such things.  The covenant between God and Abraham is at the core of our faith.  While the slow pace through these chapters in Genesis is making me do something a little different with our lessons, I’m still glad we’re using it.  Next week I’m planning to go back to a few of the activities we’ve done before, but for now we’ve just used the lighter Bible lessons to start a math program, focus a little more on reading, and spend time enjoying our composer study.

Even our “Listening Lesson” is less than what it usually is, but here’s what was on our playlist this week:

* After seaching for this quote online, I see it is from Paul Ramsey, but I can’t find any more information on it than that.

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: God Makes a Covenant With Abram

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http://b2bwithrobi.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/35-abraham.jpg

I think I’ve found my first complaint against Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, and that is the fact that he spends a really long time on Abraham.  Though really, that’s only been a negative as far as our related schoolwork is concerned.  It’s hard to find things to go-along with just the tiny sliver of the story we’re working on each particular week.  However, as far as our nightly devotions it’s been great.  The slow pace and repetition I’ve provided during the day has really helped Ian to understand the main points of the story.  Plus, it’s such a crucial part of the overall story of the Bible, so it’s one I really want to emphasize.

Once again, we took it easy last week, so aside from reading about Abraham inThe Rhyme Bible Storybook and The Rhyme Bible Storybook for Toddlers, all we really did was our “Listening Lesson”:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World

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Over the last two weeks we’ve been rowing How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman.  Ian loved the story and all the activities we did from the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 1). In addition to reading it several times, we watched a cute reading of the story on YouTube as well as a Reading Rainbow episode featuring the book. (Our library has most of the series on DVD.)  I focused mostly on geography and the sources of the various ingredients, but we also had fun doing math with a bowl of apples on the kitchen table and a few other suggestions.

We talked about the seven continents as we put together a puzzle map of the world.  (I also found some free coloring pages about the continents at CurrClick.)  Then we used the story disks from the printables at Homeschool Share to locate the various places in the book.

I printed and laminated a set of cards for matching various elements of the girl’s trip around the world. Elijah practiced sorting them into three piles based on the pictures (country, food and modes transportation), while Ian matched up the proper cards into a pile for each location.

  

Of course, the highlight of our time with this book was making an apple pie.  We tried to get the freshest ingredients possible.

We spent a day at an apple farm and picked our apples right off the tree.

  

We made our own butter by shaking whipping cream (and a pinch of salt) in baby food jars.

  

We even evaporated our own salt.  We had planned to get an egg from our friends’ chicken, but that didn’t work out.  Either did grinding our own cinnamon, though Ian was impressed with the bark.

  

After begging all week to make our pie, Ian was a great helper when we finally had collected all our ingredients.

  

And voila! Our beautiful (and delicious) apple pie!

We decided it looked too good to settle for eating it plain, so we also made some homemade vanilla ice cream by rolling it around in a pair of coffee cans.  Heavenly!

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.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool

Long Story Short: Abram and God’s Promise

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In my women’s Bible study group at church this week we were talking about how the early church had to wrestle with the concept of including Gentiles into the people of God after so many years years of following the commandments of God’s Law which kept Israel so different from the other nations.  I immediately flashed back to what we had read the night before with our family in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski.  God told Abraham, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3).  That promise was made about two thousand years before the early church.  Throughout those two millenia, God had been laying the foundation through his interaction with Abraham’s descendants, preparing the way for the Christ who would open the way for all of us to return to the blessing of relationship with God.  The 1st century Jews knew the promise; they’d heard God’s reminders through the years about making them a light to the nations, yet when the time of fulfillment came, many struggled with knowing what exactly that should look like.  How hard it can be for us in our finite little minds to grasp where our situation falls in the big picture of God’s plan.

That’s one of my favorite things about using this devotional.  It helps me remember that the story of God promising to make Abram a great nation is about so much more than the life of a man who lived four thousand years ago.  It is part of MY story.  I’m not even part of Abraham’s family line, and yet I am blessed because of God’s promise and Abraham’s faith.  What seems like such a long story as you read through the Bible really is quite short when you get right down to it.

As far as lessons, we didn’t do a whole lot this week aside from reading the five devotions and the corresponding story from The Gospel Story Bible.  For one thing, we’re still settling into our fall activities and I haven’t yet found my “groove.”  For another thing, we’re going to be spending more than a month on Abraham, and most of the extra activities I’ve seen go long with other parts of the story. (We also were enjoying diving into our October composer study, starting a math program, and “rowing” and our Five in a Row book, so we kept plenty busy!) We did work on a memory verse (“By faith he went to live in the land of promise.” Hebrews 11:9), but other than that we took it easy and may continue to do so for another week, just doing Bible time each night and our “listening lesson” during the day.  Here’s what was on our playlist this past week:

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

Long Story Short: The Tower of Babel

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This week we learned about the Tower of Babel.  I was surprised how much we were able to do with this story.  On the first night’s reading in Long Story Short by Marty Machowski, we read through Genesis 10, which contains the geneology of Noah’s sons. You would think that would be boring, but it actually led to a couple interesting discussions, including one about geneologies and ancestors.  We pulled out a family tree that we have on a large scroll, on which my husband’s side is traced back to the 15oo’s.  We talked about how if we knew who was on that “tree” before those ancestors, it would lead all the way back to Noah (most likely through Japheth, if the traditional understanding of the nations is true).  I don’t know if it meant much to the boys, but I was kind of awed by that thought.

Another logical subject to study along with the story of Babel was the idea of languages and nations.  Ian’s always asking what the Spanish words are for various things so he loved this part of our lesson.  I don’t know if Elijah understood the concept or not, but it was a nice introduction for him.  We listened to familiar songs sung in Spanish and samples of other languages.  I also showed the boys video from when I lived in Kenya and worked with Maasai still living traditionally in rural villages.  And we looked at Precious In His Sight, a book with pictures of children from various nations all around the world.

The reading for Day 5 was from Isaiah 1:18 “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”  So for Bible time on one of our extra nights, I taught the boys the hymn, “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus.”  (We also read from The Gospel Story Bible one night.)*

Reading Practice

I didn’t do a whole lot of reading practice with Ian this time (we had a crazy busy week!), but here’s what we did read together:

  • The Young Reader’s Bible by Bonnie Bruno (he and I read this one together because he’s not quite ready for it on his own.)
  • Jibber Jabber by Mary Manz Simon
  • Ian practiced reading our memory verse, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” James 4:6 using the process I described in this post.

Bible Notebook

Our notebook page this week was simple: just a sheet with our Bible verse on which they build towers using “bricks” of construction paper.  I learned that it worked best to draw a line of glue and have them build a row at a time.  Otherwise we just ended up with floating bricks all over the page.

  

Activities

The boys enjoyed building towers with our stacking blocks (and knocking them down, of course).

  

I also printed out a dot-to-dot (pg.5 of the document) for them to do.  (I put things like this in sheet protectors so they can do them over and over again with dry erase markers.)

Multimedia

Our “Listening Lesson” included several children’s songs the boys already know, only sung in Spanish:

The kids enjoyed the Spanish songs so much I decided to purchase Cantos Biblicos, the Spanish version of a CD of Bible songs we already have in English.  (Actually, I downloaded the MP3 version because I’d collected a few MP3 credits in various ways and had been saving them for something school-related.)  My hope is that not only will the boys have fun learning Bible songs in Spanish, but maybe we can even use them in ministry someday!

*I also considered reading Acts 2:1-12 and discussing the story of Pentecost, but I decided that might be too confusing for preschoolers, though I’d use it with older children.

Posted in Bible lessons, Long Story Short, Preschool, The Gospel Story

The Salamander Room

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Last week we “rowed” The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer.  It was a cute story, and Ian really got into it, but we didn’t do a whole lot of extras.  We did some of the activities in the Five in a Row manual (Vol. 3), watched the Reading Rainbow episode that featured the book, and read About Amphibians by Cathryn Sill (love this series!).  There’s also a nice reading of the story on YouTube.

We also acquired a new pet, though it’s a reptile. Grandpa caught a gopher snake, and as with the bullfrogs we raised from tadpoles over the spring and summer, it’s proving to be quite the educational pet. Learning about our snake just as we were rowing this book provided a chance to talk about the differences between reptiles and amphibians. The boys are quite fascinated by “Rocky,” especially when it comes to watching him eat his weekly pinkies. (Having to buy live food also means trips to the pet store, so we got to see some live salamanders as well, which was a nice bonus.)  Ian was quite inspired by The Salamander Room and has enjoyed creating a little world for his snake.

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.

Posted in FIAR, Literature Units, Preschool
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