On To China

We have finished up our study of India, though we have a couple lose ends to tie up. We need to finish our read aloud and the girls were given a project to do that needs to be completed. I'll share about those at a later time.

The bulk of our study has moved on. We are now studying China and then we will move on to Japan. One of the things that I had planned for the younger girls when we reached this these countries was to read the book, A Pair of Red Clogs. If you have never read this book, it is an adorable story about a young Japanese girl, her lovely new clogs, and the choice she has to make about whether to lie to her mother or not.

In addition to reading this book, I had decided to do a lapbook from my favorite lapbooking company, Hands of a Child. The lapbook is for grades K-2 so Sissy will not be doing it, but since she was headed to a play at one of the local colleges yesterday, I decided this would be the best time to start the lapbook.

In this story Mako purchases a new pair of red clogs. She is so proud of how pretty and new they are; however, during an outing with some friends she partakes in playing "the weather game". The Weather Game requires the children to kick their clogs high into the air and examine how the clogs land - resulting in a crack in her new clogs. They way the clogs land is a prediction of what the weather will be like the following day.

When I announced to the girls that they too were going to go outside wearing their "clogs" (flip flops) and play The Weather Game they couldn't wait. (See...they didn't even get dressed!)

When their "clogs" landed, we had two different predictions...Peanut's clog told us we would get rain today and Sweet Baby's said we were in for a lovely day.

We will be playing this game for then next 5 days and recording the predictions of the "clogs" and then what actually happens. After we were done with the Weather Game we headed inside to start our lapbook. We spent some time looking at where Japan is in relation to Michigan, we talked about the fact that Japan is actually a string of 4 islands and we determined the names of each island. After our discussion the girls got started on various pieces of their lapbook including their map, labeling the islands and more. I'm hoping to get some mural sized paper next week so we can paint our own chinese dragon. If that pans out, I'll let you know!