Five in a Row- The Rag Coat

Our favorite time of the day is when we do Five in a Row.  So here is a few pots that will be catch up posts of all we have been doing with FIAR.

One of our favorite rows this school year....

The Rag Coat

This book about a little girl who lived in the Appalachian mountains. She needed a coat so she can attend school.  Her mom and the quilting ladies all work together to make her a very special coat.  

This book covered many subjects that we found very interesting and some of it hit home for us.  

First you learn about the Appalachian region. We just visited my sister in law in NY and took a walk in part of the trail.  We were able to look at our pictures and talk about what it was like in the mountains back then.  

We talked about mourning and funerals. For Samantha this brought back memories of my grandmother it was the first funeral Sam has gone to.  She was very close to my grandmother.  But she was unaware of the color black was associated with death.  

We moved onto the subject of stories and how the quilt coat told a story. We both drew our own talking quilt.  I told her to draw in each block something that shows who she is or what she has done.  We expanded on the subject and learned about the slaves who used quilts to help them escape from slavery.  We read the book The Patchwork Path a quilt map to Freedom. It was a good time to talk about our own freedom and how others had fought hard to gain their freedoms.  

 Samantha's quilt I think she said the first is she is a baby, then when she started dance classes, a book for her love or reading, an ice skate for her love of skating and her recent Christmas ice show, her brothers in the army her hero's and her family.

These next 2 pictures are of Samantha reading the book while covered up by my quilt from when I was a little girl my grandmother made it for me... so its very OLD. The next is of Willy our cat he has to get involved with us while we are doing school so today he settled for sitting on the quilt.  

We talked about a variety of art that is in the book from viewpoint, color wheel, facial expressions and the art of quilting.  

We touched on the math subject of geometric shapes.

In science we talked about Natural Fabrics and Coal. I had received in the mail some samples of coal and we did a study in the types of coal, bituminous and antracite coal.  It was fun to hold it and exam it.  We looked at pictures on the internet of coal miners of years ago. This brought us to the subject of health. Mina's dad died of the coal miners disease.  We talked about how back then they didn't have the knowledge how to help people who had this.  But today they do. My mom has this. I always get the name of it wrong so I wont even try to spell it.  But she went on a year of prednisone and then on something else.  It surprised Samantha that Grandma had this.  Led to many good discussions about how to prevent many health issues and how some people can't.  

Here is a link to my pinterest that has some of the links I found many interesting things to go along with this row.

lastly we talked about the dulcimer. The traditional instrument from the Appalachian culture.  We listened to someone play it on youtube and looked at pictures of them.  If I was to do this row again I would have had Samantha make her own string instrument out of some recycled boxes.