FIAR: Make Way For Ducklings and Owl Moon

I think it's been firmly established that we're huge fans of Robert McCloskey's books. They're all so fun and well-written. There hasn't been a single one that kids didn't love to hear over and over. We recently did Make Way For Ducklings with the boys and littles. 

 They got to learn about things like the food chain, 

 Boston, MA (which included seeing pictures of Grandpa at the Boston Public Park where there's a bronze sculpture of the Mama duck and all her ducklings!). Google maps makes it so you can look at aerial pictures of Boston as they are talked about in the book. You can also go to streetview and such. It is a fun way to explore where the book took place. Of course visiting ourselves someday is on the to do list.

how various animals acted as parents,

How to put things in alphabetical order, and calendars

 and even some ducking math. 

They just loved hearing about Mama duck marching her ducklings down the street while the policemen stopped traffic for them. And they liked their names, Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack. :)

The next book we did was Owl Moon. Again, we did this one before with Olivia, but it's also one of our favorites and the boys loved it, too. During the summer, we can hear owls hooting all around the neighborhood, so this was a familiar thing.

 We talked about the phases of the moon (we didn't get to do this one during a full moon so we will be taking walks and looking for our shadows once the full moon reappears later this month), what "nocturnal", "diurnal" and "crepuscular" mean and the different kinds of animals that fly at night. (Just in case you're stumped by "crepuscular" like I was, it means an animal that's most active at dawn and dusk.

We looked at what owls do during the day and night and where they and other animals live. 

The boys made some cool paper owls and then we did the best part:

Owl pellets!

We'd only seen one once years ago so this was a pretty new adventure for us all.  

 They each looked over their pellet, which is essentially what the owl spits up after eating. They noticed it was fuzzy, which makes sense since it's pretty much hair and bones.

Then they took them apart and sorted out the tiny bones to see what they had in them. 

Both Gabe and Ezra had 3 whole mouse skeletons and olivia had at least two, but her's were harder to sort out since the skulls weren't intact at all. 

 Then they worted the bones to see what kind they were; vertebrae, legs, skull, etc.

In the end we tried to assemble one of the skeletons as best we could. There were so many teeny tiny bones it was hard to figure out what was a foot bone vs just a broken piece. It was so cool.

Olivia did her own independent project and made a yarn owl with a nest. Too cute!

Officer Buckle and Gloria

Officer Buckle and Gloria is a book we did with Olivia a couple of years ago and enjoyed so much that we wanted to do it with the boys. It was a good one to do, especially with them just finishing Safety Town shortly before. While it's not a FIAR book, we pulled a lapbook from Homeschool Share and a set of printables on policemen from Homeschool Creations.

It's a very humorous story of a safety-obsessed policeman who give safety speeches at schools, but no one listens until he gets a partner: Gloria the dog. Gloria acts out the safety tips behind Officer Buckle's back and makes learning safety fun for the kids.

The boys did all kinds of lapbook activities. They made their own list of Safety Tips like Officer Buckle. They learned their address and phone number.

They learned about different kinds of working dogs.

They also got to play a game of Red Light, Green Light using a stoplight they made.

Unfortunately, during the weeks we were reading the book, Ezra got to make up a safety tip of his own:

"Don't run down the driveway!"

(seriously... he suggested it in the midst of me cleaning him up. :)

FIAR - How To Make An Apple Pie And See The World

How To Make An Apple Pie And See The World is now one of our favorite and most involved FIAR books we've done. We had a ton of activities that really got the kids involved in the book, especially Ezra. Now that he's learning to read and do basic math, he was able to do a number of activities that he hadn't been able to do in the past.

 He did things like counting the seeds in apples, finishing patterns, circling the right number of vehicles on a card and the life cycle of an apple. 

Gabe was not exactly idle either. 

He did a huge math sorting puzzle that involved adding up numbers to put them in the right baskets. 

 He sorted a huge pile of apples into odd and even trees.

 He even made butter! :)

 It was yummy on some freshly baked rolls.

 Everyone got to play with cool sensory box that had little representations of items from the book.

Together the boys played a game making silly sentences. They would roll three dice that each had a different category of words on them (noun, verb and adjective) and then they'd make up a silly sentence. It was my job to attempt to illustrate it. :)

Finally, all the kids together made a fantastic apple pie!

Because of the late hour, they didn't get to eat it that night, so...

Who says you can't have apple pie and ice cream for breakfast?

This book also just happens to be the last one we're doing from the FIAR Volume 1. It's been such a fun time doing all the books and seeing them all over our big wall map. If you look closely, you'll see the apples that mark the places from this book where all the ingredients were gathered. :)

There is another book that is similar that we look forward to doing down the road when it fits our history studies.