FIAR: The Story About Ping

During our first week of homeschool, we "rowed" the book The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese.  I have loved this book for a long time and it was great to share it with the boys.  My oldest son had heard it before, but my youngest hadn't.  This book gave us a good chance to talk about the consequences of behavior since Ping decided to hide out to avoid a punishment.

On one of the days we did an art project and tried to draw Ping.  I found a great website with lots of easy step-by-step drawing instructions for drawing a variety of animals.  CLICK HERE to go check out that site.  My little guy was in a bad mood when we did the drawing project, but did a nice job.  He colored over the top of it, so it's hard to see his drawing.  I thought SC and I did a decent job with our little "Pings" as well. I think my Ping has been eating a LOT of fish!  haha

We also did a sink and float experiment to explore the concept of buoyancy, which is represented in the story.  I used a sink and float paper from Homeschoolshare.  Before we did the experiment I had each boy fill out their predictions about whether each object would sink or float, then we tested the objects to see if our predictions were correct.  They enjoyed this experiment very much.  I think we'll be doing a lot more of these in the future!!

Since the story of Ping is set in China, we also "traveled" to China in our Expedition Earth curriculum this week.  The boys were so excited to build the Great Wall of China as a special project.  To do this, we followed Erica's directions and it turned out great!  We used one whole box of Project Bricks plus a bit out of a second box.  We have plenty left over now to build a pyramid or castle.  I ordered the first box from Amazon, but found the second box at Hobby Lobby in the hobby section.

I wish I'd taken a photo of the Wall being mightily defended by an army of LEGO mini-figures.  One of the attackers was a LEGO gorilla wielding a banana for a weapon.......not much threat to security there!