Even though this is our 4th year using FIAR casually, we never actually went through this book before! I am not really sure why, it just never seemed to grab my attention like the others. This year however, I plan to be more intentional about covering books, even if they don’t instantly appeal to me. I am so glad we did. This book ended up taking us on a few ‘rabbit trails’, particularly studying the history of the Great Wall of China. One of the many, many reasons why I love this curriculum is because of the freedom you have to lead your kids according to their interests, while also covering all of the required subject areas.
September was an incredibly busy month for our family and so this study ended up taking us about 3 weeks to complete. Because we are also diving into a few other curriculums with the kids, we only spend about 3 days/week right now focused on FIAR which is perfect for us. Even on the days we were busy in our other studies, the kids still seemed to enjoy picking up the books from the library, eating our Chinese leftovers, and making more Chinese Paper Lanterns and Christmas Ornaments.
We used this study guide I created which included a reading comprehension worksheet about China, preposition poetry which we completed as a family, geography pages, duck labelling, a research project and a few ideas for science. Because my kids age span ranges from 5 – 10, I try to create a few worksheets for my older kids and a few that work with my early and pre-reader kids.
We had so much fun following this tutorial to create Chinese Paper Lanterns. In our family, we try to create Christmas Ornaments for every book that we study for our Literature Tree so we also used this pattern to make mini lanterns for our tree.
We made a poster called ‘Why You Wouldn’t Want to Work on the Great Wall of China’ and discussed how humans were treated during construction of the wall.
We went out to our local Foresty Farm on a search for ducks. We only found 1 all day!
We watched several documentaries about the Yangtze River, Chinese Factories and Chinese New Years that we found on youtube.
We made Wonton Soup from scratch which was so much easier than I thought it would be.
We ate a Chinese meal including fortune cookies.
We learned about floating and sinking, density, volume and mass with a few simple experiments.
We read the story over and over and had so much fun letting Ping become a part of our family conversations.
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