Five In A Row

I have started doing a bit of pre-school homeschooling with Abby. A neighbor of mine has loaned me her “Five In A Row” study guide and even loaned me some of the books and I have to say, I am really enjoying it!

It’s a simple but brilliant concept – designed to instill a love of reading and that’s one of our main goals in our early education process.

Here’s how it works. Each week you read a book. The same book. Five days in a row. Each day you have activities that are spawned from the story.

For example, the first one we did was The Story About Ping.

The story is set along the banks of the Yangtze River in China. It’s about a little duck who makes a decision to try avoid getting in trouble for being late. Instead of facing his consequences, he runs away. Ping was almost eaten for dinner but because of the kindness of one of his captors, he was returned home. There are many facets to the story and much opportunity for exploration.

The idea behind the curriculum is that you simply use different aspects of the story as “jumping off points” for learning. We learned about buoyancy (one of the little boys in the story had a barrel on his back that served as a life preserver) and so we did a science experiment. What things float? What things sink? What did the floating things have in common? What about the ones that sunk? We ventured in to art and discussed the media that the artist used (colored pencils). We did some math and counted and added up all Ping’s family members. (He had 42 cousins!) We ventured into literary concepts, also. Abby learned that fiction stories often start with “Once upon a time” and are not true stories but can be set in real places. Speaking of real places, we got into geography and social studies too! We learned about the Yangtze River and China and the people there. We ended our week with a trip to Bruce’s school to see a huge map in one of the classrooms and we located China and the Yangtze River. We wrapped things up with a trip to a Chinese Restaurant where we ate with chopsticks!

I love this concept and think it’s really perfect for getting our feet wet and getting us in to a homeschooling frame of mind.

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