The Story About Ping {FIAR}

Last week, we rowed The Story About Ping by Majorie Flack and Kurt Wiese.

This is the story of a little duck who hides to avoid being punished for his tardiness. This leads to an adventure on the Yangtze River as he sets out to find his family and the boat he calls home.

While away for Thanksgiving, we visited a duck pond and got to see some ducks in action!

The girls enjoyed our walk around the pond, discovering ducks and cattails and enjoying the beautiful fall weather!

As I've mentioned before, I left my camera behind so I wasn't able to capture our activities in action.

So instead, I later took a picture of the finished products:

Clockwise, starting with the largest photo:

-Art: Learning to draw water

-Geography: Story disk placed on the Yangtze River in China

-Science: Float/sink experiment predictions and results

-Geography: Coloring the map of China

-Math: Counting Ping's family

-Just for fun: Coloring page 

For Language, we learned vocabulary words such as scurried, master, houseboat and march.

In Geography/Social Studies, we compared and contrasted Chinese culture with our own, researched why junks have eyes painted on the front of them and learned about fishing birds.

Finally, we ended our week by taking a family trip to a local Chinese grocery store.

We browsed the various interesting foods sold there and picked out a few treats to have with our Chinese dinner that evening!

We bought Chinese rice bread, canned lychees and mango cookies.

That evening we had homemade wonton soup, stir fry and egg rolls.

Obviously, it wasn't a true Chinese meal but it was still a lot of fun especially since we got to enjoy it with the girls' Nana and Boppa!

(Boppa snapped a pic with his phone of the girls eating their Chinese meal!)

This book was a delight to row!

The girls fell in love with the little duck, Ping, and couldn't wait to join in the Master's call of "La-la-la-la-lei!".

It was so neat to see their interest in a different culture and hear them come up with their own questions about the things we came across as we read.

(Piper was the one who inquired about why there were eyes on the boats and who wanted to know more about the fishing birds.)

A few days after we were done with this book, I found Taitum curled up on a cushion on the floor in the living room with the book open.

She 'read' the whole story to herself from memory!

It is so nice to see them falling in love with these wonderful books that we are discovering together!