I waffled back and forth several times about whether or not to "row" the book Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans. Since Madeline is a orphan and she lives in a boarding school, I was concerned that my recently adopted children would be disturbed by the similarities between her school and their previous life in the orphanage. Ultimately the topics that I wanted to cover through this book (compassion for others and science of the human body) won out, and Madeline ended up being the second book that our little school "rowed" this semester.
My children are older than many who use this level of FIAR. Spending much of their formative years in an orphanage didn't lend itself to learning even basic science, history or geography skills, so we spend more time on a unit than the typical young student might. We also tend to row books for 2-3 weeks (3 days a week) instead of the suggested five days.
We love to use the FoldNLearns from the publisher (subscribe to THEIR BLOG for free access to these) to reinforce the facts and concepts learned through the stories. One of the first activities we completed was creating the “twelve little girls.” Even the boys seemed to enjoy this activity when introduced as “math manipulatives” instead of as “paper dolls.” To ensure they would stand up to daily use I put them through my laminator after the kids cut them out.
On the second day of our unit study we learned about France.We had been introduced to it in our row of How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World but we dove a little deeper in this second exposure. Since Madeline lives in France, we enjoyed looking at photos that some of my adult "kids" had taken a couple of years ago when they visited France.
The FoldNLearn had a fantastic visual of Paris landmarks. We were able to match the pictures up with those from the lapbook to identify the name of the landmark. They loved the resulting little accordion book "Tour de France."
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Having taken a detour for a couple of weeks to do a (non FIAR) fire/safety/first aid study, we didn't spend as long on the human body as we might have otherwise done for this book. Note that there is a lot of potential for expanding this into an entire study of the body systems, and I saw some fabulous ideas to do so. We chose to concentrate in the areas of staying healthy by washing hands, exercising, and eating a well balanced diet, and taking a more detailed look at only the digestive system.
To illustrate how long they should wash their hands, I asked them to sing "Happy Birthday" after putting soap on their hands. They thought it was hysterical! I'm still hearing the song when they wash their hands so I guess it was a successful lesson!
With our exercise segment, we checked the resting pulse rate then ran around for five minutes to see how much the pulse rate increased.
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Some of the books we especially liked for the eating/digestive study were:
Eating Well by Meanie Mitchell
Health and Fitness: Healthy Food by A.R. Schaefer
Look After Yourself: Healthy Food by Angela Royston
Where Does Our Food Go? by Wiley Blevins
Our Digestive System by Susan Thames
We did a little experiment to illustrate what we had just read about in the books by setting up digestion in a baggy! I told them to "eat" the bread by breaking it up into little pieces and putting it in their "stomachs" (the baggy!) We added a little water, fidgety hands, and there you had it. Complete instructions found at THIS LINK.
I really only got one comment that was intelligible as we were conducting this experiment, and that was from Isaac who said, "This is gross!" Yup. But I think they "get" what we were reading about now!
We used a paper city of Paris to review some of the landmarks we'd read about last week. Just print on cardstock, color and cut. You'll find it at made by joel.
Sometimes it is fun to mix it up a little, and we did so on this day by watching the cartoon version of the book on YouTube. Links are below if you'd like to see them:
Remember the girls that we colored and laminated on the first day of this unit? They made great math manipulatives. I'd been working with Isaac on odd and even numbers, but he didn't really seem to be getting it. I think it clicked when he lined up the girls "in two straight lines." We took away random girls and then he told me if we were left with an even or an odd number.
Rhyming words have been another challenge to my children who have English as their second language. I loved this addition to our lapbooks that helped us find the rhyming words found in the book Madeline .
A peek inside our lapbooks -- and a note that in the case of the younger kids we often just talk through the pages instead of writing since their writing skills are still emerging. I'm considering printing the answers for our next study so they can cut and paste them in.
After debating with myself so much over whether or not to study this book, I am happy that we did. My kids really needed the lessons on handwashing, exercise and what makes up a healthy diet, and the story didn't seem to bother them at all. It seems that *I* think more about living in an orphanage than they do. That was just "normal" for them before they were adopted.
The theme of having compassion on others also had a strong presence in Madeline, and I especially wanted to include that in our lessons this semester. That is still a work that is very much in progress at our house.
There were way more printables available for this book than we were able to use. If you'd like to explore other things that people have done, here is a link to a Pinterest search for FIAR Madeline.
My final idea for you -- our stapler totally stopped working on the day we finished our unit, and I wanted to stick the pages together before they got scrambled. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before, but I used my comb binder (purchased used on Ebay) to bind our lapbooks.
