Satori Smiles

Daddy helped out with today’s lessons, this is the first time he’s done a FIAR lesson with us! (Five in a Row)

We did a quick little geography review, as Satori got a new “passport”, so we had to play with that and put our China passport stamp in it. Next Daddy and Satori examined China on Google Earth, had a blast zooming in on cities to see buildings and parks in China:

Next up was the FIAR Science portion for “The Story About Ping”. The first lesson was learning about North, South, East and West, particularly where the sun rises (east) and sets (west). Helpful tools was our compass, looking outside at the sun, and our Sun Rise/Set dialer we built. After daddy read the book, we then did our Science Buoyancy experiment!

Satori gathered the materials on her chart:

Then the fun part! Dropping everything into the water! We used the Step2 Fun Flow Play Sink that Grandma and Grandpa got Satori for Christmas, so it was just the right size for Satori to plop things in the water.

As things sank or floated, we marked off the right column on our Buoyancy chart. Now, just like the little boy tied to the barrel floating on the Yangtze river, we discovered what floated and what sank.

Satori drew her very first duck today, all by herself! We started with a pencil, and when we were happy with that, we drew in with a black marker. The rest we colored in with colored pencils. Thank you “Draw Right Now” for the assistance in helping us draw our first items.

Next up we did some watercolor painting and we looked at a few Chinese watercolor paintings online to inspire us. Here’s Satori’s butterfly!

Today we read The Story About Ping again and studied the drawings of the illustrator – Kurt Wiese, it being FIAR “art day”. On the cover page, we determined it looked like he used mostly colored pencils with some texture, and some smooth markers for Ping’s yellow body. The sky was not just blue, but had flecks of purple. Ping was shaded with orange on his yellow feathers.

Satori replicated the artwork here:

Ping artwork

Next we studied reflections upon water. How the reflections reflected objects, and looked wiggly in the water. We looked at the lines in the drawing – horizontal in the water and zooming out from the sun.

And finally, here is our Ping lapbook we’ve completed so far! Just two days to go – going over the math and science concepts gleaned from the book. This is our very first lapbook.

Today was supposed to be “art day” for the Story of Ping, but we ran out of time. It was a busy day, starting with Spanish class and then a Boulder run. Then mama had to organize the schoolroom (photos to come soon!) and finally we got to sit down and do an art project relating to Ping. And here it is – our duck mosaic!

After we inspected the finished artwork, Satori was keen to notice that the water was wrong and should not have the purple! As we know, the Yangtze River is YELLOW and BLUE, not purple! Yesterday we learned why the Yangtze River looks yellow.

Our Duck Mosaic was created with the help of the Orb Factory Magnetic Mosaics Kids.