wrap up: The Glorious Flight (and the rest of November)

We took the first week of November off from Five in a Row and did a week-long geography project that I saw on Pinterest on landforms.  We read library books and watched youtube videos about the different landforms and decorated a couple of them each day.  At the end of the week, we put them together for a landform flip book.  They are so cute!

A front view:

One my favorite scenes:

clouds and rain on Hazel's hills

And another:

the BEST penguin, polar bear, and whale EVER

Last week, we did the Five in a Row unit on The Glorious Flight.  Adorable book about the first flight across the English Channel by French pilot Louis Bleriot.  We spent a day on geography, locating the English channel and coloring a map of it. We continued social studies with some discussion comparing life then (1910s) and now as we looked at the illustrations in the book.

We spent a day learning about flight with the relevant Magic School Bus episode and making paper airplanes.  That was a HUGE hit, and there have been several more made in the days since.

VERY serious Charlie

The art lesson from the manual was on perspective, especially how things appear different when you're looking up at them or looking down on them.  We took our book with us to lunch at Chick-fil-A in the mall, which is on the second floor.  We read the book while we ate and looked at the illustrations in the story that showed different perspectives and then practiced looking down onto the lower level of the mall and discussing how different things looked from where we were than when we were down below.  Then we went downstairs and looked up.  It was really simple, yet effective!

My favorite parts of this row, however, were the go-along books!  We checked out quite the basketful this time and found some really fun ones.  Our favorites:

The Wondrous Whirligig
The Flyers

The Flyers included this page in the back that showed a short history of flight including the Louis Bleriot crossing the English Channel and the Wright Brothers' flight several years before that.  Kids were really drawn to this.

We did not get to everything I had planned for this row.  Honestly, it's been a trying few weeks at Chaos Academy and we're often doing well to get the basics (reading, writing, math) done!  I read a blog post last week about how many homeschoolers want to quit in November and February.  Boy has that been true here lately. Whew!  I took some of the advice in the post to heart and have changed pace again for this week with another Five in a Row break.  We're just enjoying some Thanksgiving books and simple crafts and trying to get ready for our trip to see grandparents over the holiday.

Our Thankful Tree

some little pilgrim and indian finger puppets 

We will have a field trip related to Glorious Flight while we're visiting grandparents though! We plan to follow up our week learning about the history of flight with a trip to the National Air and Space museum.  Should be fun!

I think we plan to take most of December to do Christmas books and crafts, so Five in a Row may be on the back burner until after the first of the year.  I'll post if we do anything newsworthy, but I don't make any promises.  Thanks for following along with us!