Five in a Row: Down, Down the Mountain 2016

This year I didn't spend time in the summer planning out a schedule for which Five in a Row books we would do, but instead I've just been choosing the books as inspiration strikes. In the Fall, I always like to study one book about Appalachian culture before we make our annual Thanksgiving trip to my home-place in West Virginia. There are several Appalachian books, which you can choose from in the Five in a Row curriculum, which is awesome.

During our impromptu Fall Break, there was one day that was predicted to be in the 70s, so my friend and I decided to plan a hike up Mt. Sugarloaf. We are novices at hiking, but we had a wonderful time climbing a mountain in shorts and t-shirts on a glorious Fall day. We made it all the way to the top!The fall foliage was at peak and the view was fantastic. 

 

After the hike, we picked up our farm share and the kids couldn't resist  picking up two giant turnips. My four-year-old son is obsessed with turnips. He thinks they are the funniest things due to these two books:

 I bet you didn't even know books involving turnip humor were a thing! 

That night at dinner, as we were eating our beans and cornbread. I laughed and said, "Hey guys, we went down, down the mountain today. We picked up turnips and we're eating Appalachian food. I think I know our next book..."

We rowed Down, Down the Mountain two years ago and had a lot of fun with it. It's a wonderful story about two siblings: Hetty and Hank, who work hard planting a turnip field to buy themselves pairs of shoes. On the way to sell their turnips, they are generous with everyone they meet, giving away all of their turnips. They have only one turnip left, but they decide to enter it in the County Fair. They win and have enough money to buy their creaky-squeaky shoes and gifts for their family.

We began the week with art. We listened to all the details in the story and drew pictures of the inside of Hetty and Hank's cabin.

On Ella's birthday that Monday, we had gone to Old Sturbridge Village, a 1830s historic New England village. It is one of our favorite places, and it tied in really well with our discussion of log cabins, as many of the houses had dried apples, herbs, and hams hanging from their rafters just like in the book. Ella had just received a new Lego set for her birthday, so we spent the rest of the morning building a cabin. 

 

I don't think there was a moose in the Blue Ridge mountains, but that's okay!

For Social Studies, we learned about Appalachian culture. I told the kids stories I knew about my grandparents and great-aunts and uncles making molasses, washing their clothes at the creek, and making lye soap in a kettle outside. We also watched several educational videos from KET. They have a wonderful series called Old Music for New Ears that features folk performers like Jeanne Ritchie, Mike Seeger, and Odetta singing traditional Appalachian, blues, gospel, and Native American songs. This week we watched Bob and Susie Hutchison singing and playing lap dulcimer. We also watched KET's show Telling Tales, which features Appalachian storytelling. We enjoyed Jack and the Magic Mill and Ashpet: the Appalachian Cinderella.

We had an Appalachian-inspired poetry. Earlier in the week, we had planned a fun day to make fried apple pies with our friends, but several of us were laid low by a cold. We had made all the pies ahead of time, so we baked them up and had apple pies all week. It was perfect for our Appalachian tea along with apple cider and some wonderful poetry from Louise McNeill's memoir The Milkweed Ladies. Louise McNeill grew up in the county in West Virginia where I grew up and later became the West Virginia State Poet Laureate. This memoir is written in verse about life in Appalachia on a small farm before industrialization.

We also read from another favorite poet of mine: Wendell Berry. We read from his books The Timber Choir and Farming: A Handbook. We decorated with this beautiful basket made by  Jessie Martin, an elderly mountain woman who I knew in eastern Kentucky. She was a true mountain woman who knew all about all of the plants and herbs to be found in the forests. I was very blessed to get to talk with her and my mom bought me this basket she made for Christmas a few years ago.

 

For science, we studied mountains, and did the Mystery Science Lesson: Will a Mountain Last Forever? Word to the wise, if you have a terrible headache, it is not wise to do a science lesson that involves shaking sugar cubes in little containers. But on our next hike, my four-year-old was able to identify a rock fall, so there is that.

For the grand finale of our week, and our language arts activity, we acted out the book. The kids had a ball!

Hetty and Hank were so sad that they didn't have shoes. 

So Granny told them they should plant some turnips.

   

They took their turnips down, down the mountain to sell them at the store. 

They gave some turnips to a man who was cutting sugar cane and to a woman who was making soap. When they got to the store, they only had one giant turnip so they couldn't buy their shoes.

They took their turnip to the County Fair.

The judge chose their turnip as the best of all! They won a Five-dollar gold piece!

Hetty and Hank were so happy. They were able to buy their creaky-squeaky shoes! 

Appalachian Week: Down, Down the Mountain

We spent a fun week with Down, Down the Mountain by Ellis Credle, another Appalachian book I had never heard of until using Five in a Row. It was written in 1934 by a teacher in the North Carolina mountains who wanted to see the lives of the children around her reflected in books. It's a lovely little story about Hetty and Hank, siblings who want to buy shoes, but there family is too poor. Their granny encourages them to plant turnips and take them to sell in the town to buy their shoes. They work all summer to grow turnips, but as they head down, down the mountain to sell them, they encounter many different people who need their turnips, and they end up giving them all away.When they get to town, they find that it's the county fair and their one turnip wins a big prize and they get their shoes after all.

So what did we do with that giant turnip I mentioned in my post: Serendipity Homeschooling? We had our own county fair. The kids wanted to gather up all of the vegetables in the house. We had turnips, squash, pumpkins, and onions. Thank you farm share! First we weighed them all to see which were the biggest. It was a great lesson in fractions.

 

Then we measured the circumference. More math!

 

You can see just how big our turnip is here. Then we picked some more winners and had an awards ceremony. The winners with the vegetables with the largest circumference were the pumpkins. Here are our own Hetty and Hank, barefeet and all, to collect their prize. Five copper pennies!

  

The next day we cooked an Appalachian meal for dinner. The kids loved learning how to use a vegetable peeler on the turnips and dicing them up. I decided to make the turnips into a casserole with cheese sauce to make them more kid-friendly. Casseroles are a very Appalachian way of cooking. I don't know how many different vegetables I've had cooked up like this. All that was missing was the cream of mushroom soup.

 We also made brown beans and cornbread to go with our turnips. At least one kid actually did like the turnips. She was also the one that decided during cooking that you had to like what you make yourself. Her older sister told her that you can like making it without liking to eat it.

 
To learn more about Appalachian culture, we colored in the Appalachian Mountains on our map, practiced building log cabins with Lincoln logs, and I played them some recordings of my great-aunts in Kentucky. I spent several years recording oral histories in West Virginia and Kentucky when I was a student and an Americorps VISTA shortly after graduating college. I pulled down an oral history book I had written to show the kids the pictures. They had no idea I had ever written this book, and insisted that I read it out loud, and had lots of questions.

I have been thinking a lot lately about inspiring your kids. It always seems to come back to the fact that if you want your kids to love learning, you actually have to love learning yourself, and you have to share that with them. But it had never occurred to me that the simplest way to do this was to just share my own projects with them. I recommend trying it with your own kids. Show them that sweater you knitted or play them a recording of your choral group in college or read them some writing. You might be surprised at how inspiring you are!

Appalachian Week: When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant

Last year, we studied one of my favorite picture books of all time: When I was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant. The text of this book is so beautiful and evocative of living in the Appalachian mountains and the gentle, watercolor illustrations are just lovely. 

We put together a special meal for this week. Ella had been learning to make hot cocoa from her Betty Crocker for Boys and Girls cookbook. Everyone agreed that she is now the Number 1 Hot Cocoa Maker in the House, and I was dethroned. I was happy to pass the torch. We also made my uncle's recipe for Prize-Winning Biscuits at the County Fair. We ate homemade apple butter and bread and butter pickles. The girls had canned the pickles with their dad earlier in the summer. While we ate, we read the book Appalachia: The Voice of Sleeping Birds by Cynthia Rylant with illustrations by Barry Moser.

One of our favorite parts of this week was setting up an old-fashioned general store just like in the book. We made a list of everything they sold and tried to collect it to sell in our store. For Christmas the year before, Brent and I had made the kids an old-fashioned general store as a special present. We found a small counter/ cupboard, painted it, and added a half-barrel planter to the front full of special beanbags we had sewn to look like bags of sugar and flour and fruit and candies. The store also included an old-fashioned metal cash register, plastic cast-iron kettles, tin canisters and amber-colored bottles with old-fashioned labels.

The girls dressed up in costume. One girl would come shopping with a basket and some play  money, make her order, and the other girl would weigh the items and ask for the cash. So much math all integrated into play.

The girls borrowed several of our canisters to make it look more realistic. Here Ella trying to calculate the weight of the popcorn.

A week of food and play and lots of learning about West Virginia. Such fun!

Appalachian Week: Reading Quilts

In the Five in a Row lessons for The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills, Jane Claire Lambert mentions that one special thing you can add to your kids' life is a reading quilt. When I read that two years ago, it totally inspired me. We were already planning to make Gilead his baby quilt (six months late) for Christmas. So I got this big idea that we should make all the children reading quilts. These wouldn't be big enough to fit their bed, but would be just perfect for cuddling under while reading books. The fabrics would feature some of their favorite book characters and alphabet fabrics.

Yes, I was completely overambitious to think that, but my husband jumped in and saved the day because he's awesome, and because he can sew three or four quilts and bake 1000s of Latvian gingerbread cookies if you don't require him to go to work for a week.

So because of my wonderful husband, we ended up with lovely quilts for each kid. They loved them, and they continue to use them on their beds or in the reading nook or as fort-making supplies all the time.

First, we have Gilead's quilt. He was just an infant at the time, so he didn't have any particular reading interests, but the quilt ended up including several of his absolute favorite things now: trucks and "cowzas."
 
The backing might be my favorite fabric ever. It's called "Pooches and Pickups." Though I do wish I had bought the blue version since he loves The Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle so much.
 

Ella's quilt has a mix of old-fashioned characters and fabrics since she loved Little House on the Prairie, Fancy Nancy squares, and space and state fabrics because she loves non-fiction books.


The back has these cute Japanese girls in flannel.
 
Mabel's quilt features pigs! She has been obsessed with pigs since she was two and it's still going strong. The three little pigs appear several times as well as other favorite fairy tale characters like The Three Bears. Angelina Ballerina is also in there because Mabel loves to dance and the Muppets, especially Miss Piggy.

 
The back has this awesome pig flannel that we couldn't pass up!
 
 Beatrix's quilt features the love of her life: Kermit the Frog, Beatrix Potter fabric, toile Nursery rhyme fabric, and Snow White.
 
 And the back is more of the Kermit the Frog flannel.

These blankets are very well-loved now. If you ever consider giving your kids a special non-toy present for Christmas, these are wonderful and useful for those cold, January read-alouds. Word to the Wise: you might want to start making them in August.

Appalachian Week: The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills

One of the first books we ever did with Five in a Row was The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills.  I was surprised I had never heard about this book since I thought I had read all children's books set in Appalachia. It's the story of a little girl named Minna whose father dies and her mother's friends ban together to sew her a quilted coat from scraps. It's definitely a tear-jerker and reminded me of Dolly Parton's song "Coat of Many Colors."

I wrote several blog posts about our adventures with The Rag Coat on my old blog so here's a flashback to our first year. I can't believe how they've all grown.

The weather happened to get really frigid just as we were starting this unit in November. So it was the perfect weather to huddle around the pellet stove, wrapped up in our favorite blankets and read aloud. The quilt they are sitting on is one my grandma made and they each have their special blanket Brent knitted for each girl when she was born.
 

We also colored our own rag coats from a free lapbook by Aussie Pumpkin Patch.

As we were thinking about other kids who may not have warm coats and other things this winter, it was also a great time to pack up our shoeboxes for Project Christmas Child. We put together four nice boxes to send to kids in other countries for Christmas.
 
We also learned a lot about quilts. First we learned that quilt started with the letter Q and cut and pasted strips of scrapbooking paper onto the letter Q.


For math, I printed out these quilt grids and shapes from Mathwire's quilt activitities. I had some scrapbooking paper that looked like fabric so I cut it down to 8 1/2 by 11 and printed the shapes from Mathwire onto the pretty paper. We've been learning about rectangles and triangles in math, so it was a great extension of that. Mabel's square is first and Ella's is second.
 

Then in our Rightstart math lesson, we were learning about triangles. We made this Ten Triangle. Again I just copied the triangles from the book on scrapbook paper.
 
 The most popular activity was something I created for my toddler who likes to rip things apart. I made a sticky quilt table. I taped a piece of clear contact paper on our small table so the sticky side was up. Then I gave the girls a lot of fabric squares we had left over from various baby quilts we've made. I thought it would mainly interest Beatrix, but all three girls had a ball putting the squares on.
 And, of course, ripping them off.
 

On our last two days, we studied Appalachian culture. Since I grew up in West Virginia and my mom's family is from Eastern Kentucky, it is a favorite subject of mine.

We read a lot of my favorite books including:
When I was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant
Appalachia: The Voice of Singing Birds by Cynthia Rylant
M is for Mountain State by Mary-Ann McCabe Riehle
My Mountain Song by Shutta Crum and Ted Rand

Boy, do Cynthia Rylant books make me homesick!
  
We also listened (and danced!) to some mountain and bluegrass music. Of course, we had to listen to Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors." Then we listed to June Carter Cash and had this funny conversation with Ella.
"Her voice sounds funny!"
me: "She has a Southern accent. People talk differently in different parts of the country. Haven't you noticed that Mamaw and Papaw talk differently than you do?"
Ella: "No they don't, Mom! Everybody's voice is different!"

Ella's favorite by far, though, was Doc Watson. "Mom, let's listen to 'A Frog Named Gordon.'" "Um, you mean, 'Froggie went a Courtin'?" "Yeah!"

We ate some Appalachian foods like beans and cornbread. Okay, so we have this for dinner almost every week, but it is Appalachian food.

We also made some mountain collages, which I thought turned out really nicely.

by Mabel

by Ella

Then, finally, for science, we learned about how coal (or any sedimentary rock) is formed. It was a really yummy science lesson. We made what Ella called "Coal Mine Bars." Really they were S'More Granola Bars. The recipe was from the King Arthur Flour Baking Companion. We pressed down a layer of granola for the earth, then chocolate chips for the decaying plants, then marshmallows for more sediment and more granola on top. We pressed it all down and baked it and yum! See the coal layer?