February is flying by.

This last week I realized how much I love and use our "Five in a Row" curriculum. I didn't have a FIAR book last week to use, as the ones I had put on hold hadn't arrived yet, so we spent our week with other books and activities.

I hadn't realized just how much I've come to appreciate the structure offered by our study guide. Sweetly, after reading this week's selection, How To Make An Apple Pie and See the World, to Wolfgang, he said, "Maybe this can be our Five in a Row book!" It certainly is, as of today, and we're enjoying it. We don't follow the curriculum religiously, but it provides enough of a framework to help me keep our work organized and cohesive.

Here are some of the books we spent time with last week:

Who Owns the Sun? by Stacy Chbosky
rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was written by a fourteen year old and is a very moving account which becomes more interesting the more often it's read. We read it five times aloud (it being a part of the Five In A Row curriculum) and became more intrigued and delighted by the imagery after reading #2. We then took turns making our own imagery in the format of the story, pretending that the young narrator asked his father about the moon and the sea.
The story is told about the narrator's discovery that he is a slave. It is moving and I cried the first time I read it. My kids thought I was crazy but they are starting to understand the gravity of these issues.

Lon Po Po by Ed Young
rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is a Chinese motif on the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood. I'm not sure if it is actually a Chinese version of the story or if it is simply done with Chinese elements, but the story is interesting, familiar, yet new. The pictures, however, are pretty scary. My kids didn't seem to mind but it's a dark read. In a way, this seems more appropriate than the cute little girl with the cartoonish teeth poking out from under a bonnet. This one features a blown out candle, pitch black, terrifying eyes...the whole scary shebang.

Marco Polo by Demi
rating: 5 of 5 stars
For my six year old (now seven) to sit through more than 50 pages of this book without straying once attests to its excellence! I love most of Demi's books and wish I had learned all of history this way.
A fun aspect of this one is how Demi describes the way that Marco Polo described what are now ordinary animals as the extraordinary observations that they were at the time, so much so that most people didn't believe him when he returned home to Italy. He described the "very ugly unicorn that looked like a pig"~~a rhinoceros; and the "'snakes and serpents of vast size' which were really pythons and crocodiles." This book sparked in me an interest to read Marco Polo's accounts of his travels. It is inspiring to see Demi's gorgeous and detailed depiction of it~~far more than the paragraph devoted to it in grade school. Also, there is a beautiful map in the back which we have since revisited several times in our map studies.

Ol' 556 by Shannon Cartwrightrating: 5 of 5 stars
If you have a child who loves trains, this book is for you. I highly recommend it for a great many reasons. I love that it is historical and incorporates an exciting fictional story alongside instructional material pertaining to the railroad in Alaska and historical material such as old pictures. The story itself is engaging and well-written, and I can sense the excitement of "breakup," which is what spring is called here when all the snow starts to melt. It is a very loud and exciting time, with water dripping and flowing everywhere and ice floating and cracking. (I know Alaska does not by any means have a monopoly on melting snow, but this book captures it in a dynamic way.) The drama and tension in the story gets wrapped up with the drama of breakup. The illustrations are interesting and spark a lot of good conversation with the kids.