Five In A Row

I have talked about the curriculum I use some of the time called Five In A Row. We love doing it. You take a book from the list and you read it every day for a week. Each day you do a different activity from the book you can do as many as you like or as little as you want. I usually try to do a few. Some are very simple some are more involved. When do this its called Rowing. From one book you will learn a varity of things... history, art, poetry, science, math, grammar and so much more. Example... from Madeline we learned about some of our body parts and our appendix. We compaired the heaters in our house to the ones used a long time ago and we actually have the same ones used back in the 1940's, she studied France. From that book for science we learned about plants and how they live. For Art and Math we learned about symmetry.

So this past week we rowed The Glorious Flight... across the channel with Louis Bleriot.

So we always do a Story Element page to all the books we row. Sometimes I let her draw the plot when it will be a lot of writing in that small space. This time I also wrote in the Characters as she told me who they are.

From this book she learned about the first steps in man taking flight, about different types of airplanes. About the parts of a plane. About different types of travel through out time.

For math she learned about Roman numerals and she can write them from 1 to 10.

We did a time line of flight. From 1903- the Wright brothers fly the first plane in NC to 1976 the British and French begin passagner flights for the Concorde that travels faster then the speed of sound. We then flew our own paper airplanes and talked about what kind will fly better.

We read about a fictional person who wanted to fly so bad her glued wings on himself... yes we read the story about the story of Daedalus and Icarus

She also learned about saying sorry for doing something wrong even when its an accident and how the father in this story didn't do so. She also learned about Onomatopoeia's... its using words to make sounds. Samantha's examples of a plane sound zoom, click, boom. From the story clacketa and crump. These are parts of grammar that we would not have learned yet if we didn't do Five in a Row. I am so glad I was able to borrow this from a friend. I am going to purchase other editions of FIAR.

Remember the carrot experiment I told you about? No not the funny potato who didn't want to grow eyes. The carrot we put in the shallow dish of water well its really growing now....

Here is a math sheet I made up after seeing it on a teachers blog which I forget at the moment which one it was. I had her do fractions and measure in inches and centimeters and I just realized I spelled that wrong on her sheet. Opps ...
I have been a little worried about grammar for her. I didn't like what we were doing. It didn't seem to be sticking in her brain. So next year I found a great curriculum that I think will work better. I plan on using Bob Jones English. But for the remainder of First Grade we will continue with the stuff I find on the internet and these wonderful books from the library. A message board I go to once in a while had these listed on a post where a mom with a first grader was worried she wasn't getting enough grammar. Many other mom's recommended these books. They put each part of grammar in a story... Nouns, Verbs, Pronouns, Adjectives etc.... I took out 2 one on verbs and the other on adjectives.