When I Was Young in the Mountains--FIAR

Reading a book...all on her own!  This is a big accomplishment for Delaney.  She's jumped by leaps and bounds with her reading skills.  She is now reading a book on snakes and learning about them.

We've just finished rowing the book When I Was Young in the Mountains  by Cynthia Rylant.  This was an enjoyable book to read over and over with Delaney, plus we had some fun activities to go along with it.

Social Studies:  Emotions--crying.  Appalachian culture and history, and occupations.
At one point in the story Grandma cried a happy cry.  We talked about all sorts of emotions, public displays of emotions and our emotional health.  Delaney and Liam pulled out the flannels and made many different emotional faces.
We also talked about the different occupations from the past and how things have changed now, in particular there was a traveling photographer.
We've studied Appalachian culture before, especially life among the coal mines, this was a repeat in this topic, but a good review.

Science:  Nutrition and Snakes.   In the book, Grandma served corn bread, pinto beans and fried okra with milk.  We analyzed whether or not this was a nutrition meal after learning more about the food pyramid.  We learned how legumes and beans can be combined with breads to make a complete protein.  The verdict....yes it is a nutritious meal.  Every food group was accounted for --it would have been good for some fruit, but really, we don't have fruit and veggies at every meal.  I looked into the vitamin content of okra, and was amazed at how many nutrients it has.

It took me three stores before I found some fried okra to buy, honestly I didn't think it would be that hard here in the 'south', but I found it and we too, had some pintos, cornbread and fried okra for lunch one day.  I like okra, Barry does not.  Liam and Delaney decided that they sided with Barry on this one!

 Now that spring is slowly rearing it's windy head, we decided to go and get some flowers and broccoli plants for the garden.  Cailin is studying plants so the two blended together fairly well.

 For her presentation at our group meeting Delaney shared what she learned about snakes.  She read the books and wrote most of her annotations (I helped when her hand got tired), and she drew her own illustrations.  We soaked a chicken egg in vinegar to demonstrate how snake eggs are leathery and not hard like bird eggs.   I don't have a picture of Tycon, Connor's corn snake, but she also brought a skin shedding of his to show the others.

 Math:  Weights and Measures.  In the book there is a general store with a scale.  This lead to discussions of weights and measures.  While we were at the fruit market, Delaney, Cailin and Liam decided they wanted to spend one of their own dollars for candy, which is sold by the pound.  This was a great time to talk about weighing things.  We also spent a bit of time in the produce area of Walmart weighing fruit and ice cream (?).

On the counter of the store there are gallon jars of pickles, so I pulled out different sizes of canning jars to fill with water and discover how many cups each size held (pints, quarts, gallons).

Language Arts:   Theme--contentment and repetition.   The theme of this book was contentment, being happy with what one has.  We talked about this and Delaney voiced that she has a wonderful life and is very happy with what she has. Yeah!  Authors sometime use repetition in a story, Ms. Rylant did too.  The line "When I was young in the mountains I....." was used often.  So I had Delaney write her own "When I was young is Pulaski I...." she has good friends and family to enjoy life with and to be contented about.

We never seem to get the art concepts that are discussed in the Five in a Row manual.  Sad really, I'm not very artistic and Delaney loves it....I'll have to try and do more of this on our next row.