Rowing Week 4 : Ask Mr. Bear

I wasn't too sure about this book. Coming right after Play with Me, which is also filled with animals I was little "done" with animal books. Having WAY too ambitious of plans for any of the other books I have from the library to "row" I went ahead. To say that we just did a little here and there would be an understatement. We did a little...

But the boys didn't really seem to notice. I was even thinking about doing another week just to get in a few more ideas that I'd had but when I took the book out on Friday I sensed a little "ugh" from #3 so we'll move on.

This is a sweet book though about a boy wanting to get his mother a birthday present. He asks his farm animal friends for help, each offer him a suggestion then go with him in the search when what they offer isn't right.

Physical :

I tried to get each of the boys to get down and act out each of the action verbs used when Danny and the animals go on their search. My boys were not interested in skipping, running, or galloping across the room.

Lapbook/Scrapbook Activity :

I printed each of the animal's coloring sheet/handwriting practice sheets from first-school and made a packet of each page in order the animals are in the book. (Animals I couldn't find handwriting tracers for I made my own)

I also printed a lapbook activity from homeschool share that matched the animal with their gift but that one held no interested and was bagged.

Science/Home Studies :

When making my menu for the week I was trying to figure out snacks for all the littles (seriously, they are eating me out of house and home...I think they spend much of their day telling me how hungry they are and I spend much of my day in the kitchen making them food - sigh, it's getting old). I thought some homemade bread would be a nice treat. And what would be better than homemade butter to top that bread? Oh...wait...the cow offers milk and cream...we could make butter...read the book first...we have cream...thank you Mrs. Cow...now shake!

This was probably the highlight of my week. I bought baby food in jars (instead of the handy plastic containers) and handed out heavy cream poured into four jars (I used a smallish spaghetti sauce jar that was set to go to recycling). I turned on Elizabeth Mitchell on pandora.com and we danced and shook and danced and peeked in our jars and danced. We had a blast...and we made butter! Delicious on our homemade bread!

"Rowing" Ask Mr. Bear was really good. I'm glad we did it. Though I could see how it would be even better in the spring when you could go to a farm and possibly see a lamb being born or something. I also meant to make the boys some pillow forms to stuff, the goose suggests feathers for a pillow and while I wasn't going to do feathers, a pillow could have been good. Ah, well. Another week done anyway.

Links :

Homeschool Share - Ask Mr. Bear lapbook

First School

Making butter - this link was helpful via angrychicken and googling homemade butter in baby food jars resulted in a lot of links, I used tips from this one.

I'm thinking next week we'll take a break from true "rowing" but I think some of the ideas from homeschool creation's gingerbread baby's pack look good and I'm thinking that I may be able to concentrate with the big kids with some of the things we've been struggling with (can anyone say factor trees, prime numbers, multiplication and prepositions) by working them into a book or two. Concentrating on what we're struggling with but in a fun way we're not used to.