Satori Smiles

In Papa Piccolo, set in Venice, Italy, gondolas play a large part in the story. Satori and I learned a little more about gondolas – they are black, they have an ornate metal bow decoration, and they are long and flat. The person who propels a gondola is a gondolier. These days gondolas cater to the tourist industry.

Today we made a paper Gondola boat that stands on its own.

Gondola Boat Craft

Paper Gondola Boat Craft

You will need:

• Black construction paper
• Gold fadeless or origama paper (we had to settle for gold cardstock)
• Scissors
• Glue
• Tape
• Glitter glue or glitter
• 2 x 8-inch strip of colored construction paper

1. Fold the black construction paper in quarters.
   

   Black construction paper folded in quarters, ready to cut

2. With the open fold on left, cut the bow shape. Since I wanted my 4 year old to cut it herself, I made a white line for her to use as a guideline.
   

   Cutting our gondola

3. Unfold the paper, fold along the long side, and glue ends together to create the bow and stern.
   

   Tape ends of gondola to create the boat shape

4. For the bow, fold the gold paper in half, and cut out a design. Glue to one end of your gondola.
5. Decorate with your glitter glue!
   

   Decorating gondola with glitter

6. To make the gondola stand, fold the 2×8-inch strip of construction paper in half. Cut a notch in the center half an inch wide at the top and 1 inch deep. Take the ends together. (We found a notch shorter than one inch in width to be best.)
   

   Gondola stand

7. Set gondola in notch and sail away!
   

   Gondola boat in stand

Here’s Satori’s finished gondola. It was her idea to put the pink hearts in, she wanted the “most beautiful gondola”!  Satori calls it her “love boat” and I don’t even think she’s heard of the show.

Gondola Boat craft

Since we made two, we can have a reggata (boat race)! She’s chanting “cheer for love boat!” after I told her we’d race them in a regatta.

Gondola regatta

One of my favorite parts in rowing FIAR is when Satori learns her geography. (And mama learns a lot too!) Today we learned about Venice, Italy, the way its streets are made of water, gondolas, and its flag.

First, we Google Earthed Italy, and then Venice. Eek, you can see how dusty my laptop is, but on the bright side, you get a little cutie’s face peering back at you!

Google Earth - Venice, Italy

And a better look. Hmmm, Venice looks like a boot itself!

We really zoomed in and saw lots of boats, which I assume were gondolas.  Both Satori and I found it fascinating to explore the city this way! I’d never been to Italy, only the gondola ride in Las Vegas. Which of course, being the techies we are, we YouTubed a gondola ride at the Venetian, Las Vegas. (If you hit YouTube earlier on this particular day (April 1), you were in for a surprise.)  So we not only got to feel we were on a gondola ride, we got to hear the gondolier’s singing!

Okay… now I’m really ready for a vacation!

Then, we pulled out our interactive globe and I asked Satori to find Italy, and I had never shown it to her on a globe before. She zeroed right in! All I explained early was that Italy was in Europe, was near France, and looked like a boot sticking in the Mediterranean sea. It is pretty easy to spot, but I was pretty proud of my 4 year old to find it on the globe right away.

Italy on globe

As always, when we study a new country, we love to make its flag. In our Papa Piccolo book, there was a handy flag illustrated, so we knew what the Italy flag looks like. After she drew it with crayons for her lapbook, I cut out some colored paper scraps and made a little puzzle for her to put together.

Italy Flag "puzzle"

It was a no-brainer to finish.

Making Italy flag

As always, when we finish a flag and tape it on a stick to wave around, Satori complains that it doesn’t wave like a REAL FLAG and pouts. Oh well.

We got to enter Venice, Italy on our passport, and I stamped it with today’s stamp.

Satori's Passport - Venice, Italy entry (Apr 01, 2009)

You may have noticed I mentioned “lapbook” up there when yesterday I specifically said we wouldn’t be doing a lapbook. I forgot about the free homeschoolshare.com site and all its lapbook goodies, lots of great learning tools and go-alongs for FIAR books! It’s a wonderful way for Satori to look back and remember everything we learned when rowing a book. HomeschoolShare (HSS) just isn’t good at being listed in Google for some reason (I guess I only looked at the first page of google search returns for papa piccolo fiar). Anyway, we will be doing a simple yet informative Papa Piccolo lapbook this week. And here’s our start!

Papa Piccolo lapbook

I’ve found it most exciting to be spontaneous about our next FIAR book to row, to see where the weather, current events, and local activities takes us. Our last book was perfect timing for our blizzard-like conditions last week. For example, we’ll save Very Last First Time for the week we can visit tundra at the Rocky Mountain National Park… The Rag Coat for when we’re ready to try quilting… So up until today I hadn’t figured out our next book.

I asked Satori what she wanted to read about, and she said “a little girl who lost her parents and is an orphan”. The only orphan-related books we had on hand were Clown of God (which I want to save for the Colorado Renaissance Festival this summer) and Papa Piccolo. So Papa it is!

Papa Piccolo

Satoris cat, Soma

We read it tonight for the first time. Satori has her own cat, Soma (a Bengal cat), so we’ll take this opportunity to learn more about cats. We’ll explore Italy and Venice, really get into color this week, and learn some common italian words!

I do not think we’ll be doing a lapbook this time around, but focusing more on being more interactive and making cool stuff. I just want to really have fun this week and the last few lapbooks we did were just me cutting and pasting for the most part. We’ll make lapbooks again for sure, but just not this week.

Tonight I spent about an hour and a half making our “gameplan” to row Papa, check it out here. Everything is tentative, but I hope the time I spent tonight will make things more organized and easier this week.

Rowing Papa Piccolo – planning page

The page above will be changing as we row throughout the week, and hopefully it will be helpful for those of you who have yet to row Papa Piccolo!