Satori Smiles

I admit I am not much of a cook. My failed cakes I blame on our high altitude (9000 ft). But I am going to try! With each FIAR rowing, we’ll make a related food item. This week is Frosty Snowballs dessert for Katy and the Big Snow rowing.

Frosty Snowballs

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1 cup sifted powdered sugar
• Edible sparkles or colored sugar

1. In a large mixing bowl beat butter with an electric mixer on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add the granulated sugar; beat until combined, scraping sides of bowl occasionally. Beat in water and vanilla until combined. Beat in as much of the flour as you can with the mixer. Using a wooden spoon, stir in any remaining flour and the chopped pecans.
2. Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place 1 inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheet.
3. Bake in a 325 degree F oven 20 minutes or until bottoms are light brown. Cool completely.
4. Place 1/3 cup powdered sugar in a bowl. Gently roll and shake cooled cookies until covered in snow. Sprinkle with colored sparkles or sugar.

Various sized "snowballs" entering oven

Here’s Chef Satori licking her hands of yummy powdered sugar after rolling the snowballs in “snow”! We sure wish Daddy was here to help us eat these!

We’ve extended our Katy rowing a few more days to study compasses and blizzards and finish our Katy and the Big Snow lapbook.

Thanks to Hands of a Child, we had a few Compass lapbook entries to add. After working with all the paper plates earlier, I decided to make a compass for Satori, using of course, a paper plate as the compass. Satori then wrote in the letters for directions. She knew where to put “N” for north, and knew the rest of the letters, but not where to put them, so mama had to help. We colored one end of a stick red to point to North. I manually drilled a whole in the center of the stick, and then using a little brad, pinned it to the middle of our compass. (A cardstock compass needle would be an easy option.) Now, Satori can spin the compass dial and point it to North herself!

Then I attempted to explain blizzards. I told her about the “Storm of the Century” (the March 1993 one) in which I went to Florida via bus for spring break, but got stuck in that scary blizzard. We talked about the Schoolchildren Blizzard in 1888 (tomorrow we will read a book on this).

Another creative inspiration hit me.

Vehicles Stuck in Snow

• Construction paper of different colors, including black
• Circle paper puncher (or cut out circles yourself)
• Ziplock bag
• “Snow” – white sand, white glitter

We took a scrap of black construction paper and had Satori paper-punch round circles out. I then cut out vehicle shapes and had Satori glue her black tires on them. Here we made a fire engine, ambulance, and sports car. Satori placed them in our zip bag.

I happened to have some sparkly white sand handy, so we filled the bag with the sand. I then taped it shut.

Satori got a kick out of trying to “plow” out the vehicles in the snow!

We’re almost finished with our Katy and the Big Snow lapbook. Tomorrow we’ll wrap it all up and start our next FIAR rowing!

Katy and the Big Snow Lapbook

To take advantage of all our newly fallen snow that’s just a handful away, we did a few science experiments on our snow.

VOLUMES OF SNOW VS MELTED SNOW WATER

Yesterday the meteorologist predicted 18 inches of snow to fall in the mountains. Does that mean 18 inches of water? Let’s find out. We gathered a jarful of snow, right outside our kitchen.

Gathering fresh mountain snow

After Satori filled it to the brim (no packing down), we measured with a tape measure. Fresh snow in a jar measured to be 5 inches.

5 inches of fresh snow

Two hours later, it was completely melted. (By this time Daddy got home from his snowstorm delay and got to help us.)

Did we still have 5 inches of melted snow? No, it was only one inch of water!

1 inch of melted snow

Maddie lapped up the fresh snow and we also went over the results of our second experiment.

SALT AND SNOW

Does snow melt faster by itself, or with salt on top?

Does salt help snow melt faster?

And I’m sorry to say that the snow melted before we could make a photo comparison, but we did see right away that the snow with SALT melted faster!

EXAMINING SNOW WITH MICROSCOPE

I finally got Satori to peruse the snowflake website so we got to see all the different possible types of snowflakes, and what might form in what temperatures. Then I pulled out our black cutting board I had stuck in the freezer overnight and collected some snow. We whipped out our magnifying glasses and looked at the individual flakes. But both Satori and I were a bit disappointed in these flakes, as yesterday, we had TONS of fresh fluffy snow falling down fast! Too bad I didn’t get the idea at that time.

Examining Snow

If you click on this photo for more detail, you can kinda see some 6-pointed snowflakes.

Using a microscope on snow

We were so happy to see our neighbors use their big truck to plow our overwhelmingly steep and long driveway, we’ve been stuck at home all week! Just like Katy and the Big Snow, we needed help to get out of our house.

Plowed driveway, we can get out of our house!

Satori narrates our new book we just made today – Vicky and the Big Mess. She is so proud of her books! This is our book we made to illustrate the concept of personification which we learned from Katy and the Big Snow.

This week we studied Katy and the Big Snow, about a hardworking, strong, red snowplow named Katy who helps the town. Today was FIAR Math day, and it was simple to count things in the book, so we’re combining a few Language Arts and Art concepts learned, particularly PERSONIFICATION – where we give human traits to non-living objects, and we’ll take this to illustrate a book.

First we looked at Katy and the artwork in the book. We picked out 3 colors (red, yellow and green), same as used in the book and Satori went to work drawing Katy the snowplow with her “human eyes”. Here it looks like she personified the house (which for some reason is on stilts) too!

I had a new Bare Books order I was trying to hide from Satori for the right time, but she kept finding it. She was not going to rest until we made a new book! So this was the perfect opportunity to apply the concept of Personification. I had her choose an inanimate object – gave her a choice of vacuum or car and she also threw in a lightbulb and mop. She ended up choosing a vacuum. Then we chose a name for her – Vicky. I asked her to give her human characteristics – friendly and clean. Together we mapped out a plot, complete with climax!

Vicky is a blue and orange vacuum cleaner who is clean and friendly. She is proud of her clean living room floor.

In the book, something dreadful happens and Vicky and her friend Molly the Mop swoop/sweep in to save the day!

For Language Arts FIAR day, today we dramatized the story of Katy and the Big Storm by Virginia Lee Burton. Luckily, I had Miss Mayor Satori to help me plan out the city.

This is our second time using a compass for FIAR, and this time Satori knew exactly what a compass was for, and what the “N” means. We used our compass key to layout the map of Geoppolis, which isn’t exactly straight up and down for north.

Together Mayor Satori and I built the city of Geoppolis, complete with roads, signs, buildings, a water tower, ice pond, and the city vehicles.

And an aerial view. (Click the picture for bigger detail.)

One day it started to snow. and it went on all day. Looks like a Big Snow! Everyone and everything was stopped, except KATY!

She plowed out the city of Geopolis. In doing so, Katy helped the police protect the city, the postmaster deliver the mail,  the Telephone and Electric Company repair their poles, the Water Department fix the water main, the doctor help the patient get to the hospital, the fire chief put out a fire, and so on… Katy helped save the town!

Finally the town could move again. In the process, as we traveled to East, West, North and South Geoppolis, we also got nice practice with our cardinal directions. FIAR rocks!

After we determined the city was safe and sound, Mayor Satori decided to have some fun in the snow!

After mopping and a shower, we also learned the literary device of personification – where Katy was a hard working snow plow that was given human qualities. And as always, we learned some new vocabulary:

Tomorrow is Art day so mama has to quickly research up some fun and cool snow crafts!

Ooh, I just googled “katy and the big snow fiar” and guess whose blog came up NUMBER ONE? (As a former web programmer, it seems easy for my websites to rise to the top in Google, but it’s always a pleasant surprise.)

http://www.google.com/search?q=katy+and+the+big+snow+fiar&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS293US294

Just as predicted, we woke up today to a cold, blustery day with SNOW! The power even went out a few times, making our first rowing of Katy and the Big Snow even more relevant. At first I was a little worried about Satori not enjoying rowing this book 5 times, it being about a snowplow, but I have a whole week of fun things planned to bring the story alive for her. There was much more to learn in Social Studies than I imagined, so we might have to break this up into two parts.

After our first reading, we colored our lapbook cover page and then did a few lapbook entries. Here is a description of what Katy does in the summer (repair roads) and winter (plow roads). Satori has always enjoyed filling in the letters, and she has improved a thousand-fold since she first attempted copying letters in February.

Next we learned about important jobs in a typical city, what makes cities run smoothly. Hospitals, fire station, post office, school, library, etc… Both the community helpers (people) and their buildings and vehicles all play a part. If one goes down, it can spell trouble for a city.

Then we learned about different road signs and as we drive around this week, I’ll be pointing out typical road signs. I also want to show her the power lines that “connect” a city with electricity and telephone service. We made cute little signs and stuck them in clay piles. Tomorrow they should be dry and we can use them in our Katy and the Big Snow reenactment!

Then we filled out the map of Geopolis. This will be a good review for Math Day, as the book has all its buildings by number on the map.

Satori enjoyed herself and did not want to stop her “learning”.

Spring is here but the upcoming week is forecasted for SNOW!

Luckily I ordered some FIAR books to do with snow before our winter totally disappears for the year. Last night I prepared our new lapbook for Katy and the Big Snow. You may notice that a lapbook can take TONS of paper – heavy weight cardstock paper in all colors. The environment-conscious part of me cringes, but our homeschool does recycle anything we can, and all scraps are put in a big scrap drawer to use later!

Some of the things we’ll be learning this week will be continuing our studies on weather (particularly snow and blizzards), jobs to make a city run smoothly, personification, compasses/direction, and more. Geopolis is a made-up city, but for our geography studies we’ll introduce South Dakota, and maybe Satori and I will drive through there in the next month.

I am experimenting with a new lapbook style of extending the basic file folder.We’ll see how we like it once it’s full.

Resources used to plan our Katy and the Big Snow lapbook include:

• FIAR booklet
• Homeschool Share’s Free resources
• Hands of a Child ebook
• FIAR’s archive 2 years ago of ideas for Katy and the Big Snow
• Googling of “katy and the big snow fiar”
• My own creativity/ideas