Around the World: France

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For our next trip around the world, we visited Egypt and France with the Five in a Row book: The Giraffe That Walked to Paris by Nancy Milton. This is a true story about a giraffe given as a gift by the Egyptians to the French King in the 1800s.

These are the only pictures I managed to take of our weeks studying the book, a quick French breakfast with croissants, sausages, and tea before church one Sunday.

We found Egypt and France on the map and traced the route La Giraffe would have taken to her new home in Paris. We also read several non-fiction books about Egypt and learned about the Pyramids and Ancient Egyptian life. For science we learned about giraffes and their habitat. We also learned about climates around the world.

In the book, a scientist tries to draw a picture of a giraffe without ever seeing one. So, we decided to draw our own funny animals. Ella remembered a game where you take a sheet of paper and fold it into quarters lengthwise. The first person draws a head and then folds down the paper and the next person draws a torso, folds it down, and draws legs, and then the fourth person draws feet. The drawings came out super funny. Then we used the drawings to do a close observation exercise (inspired by Brave Writer). One person had to choose a drawing at random, and try to describe to another person how to draw the crazy creature. The drawer would do their best to recreate the picture just from the description and then we compared the two drawings. We had lots of fun with this activity.

We also learned more about the 19th century by attending Home School Day at Old Sturbridge Village. The girls took a class in baking on the hearth (which Ella will describe in my next post). We also got to see them boiling maple sap, and attend a fun presentation on old and new ways of preserving foods.