One of the best resources we ever discovered was through Five in a Row created by Jane and Steve Lambert, utilizing outstanding children's books. There are different guides for different ages and each volume has a choice of approximately 16 books. You pick a book from the guide and read it everyday for a week. The guide is simple to use and everything is laid out for you. They provide step-by-step instructions for teaching social studies, language, art, math, and science. Some weeks we choose to simply read the book and talk about it. Other weeks we dove into the lessons and activities.
Many of these books came out in the early 30's, 40's, 50's so you may have read some of them when you were little. Most of the books are available through Libraries on Overdrive, online stores in physical form as well as ebook and audiobook. I prefered buying the books. We have a tendency to read the books over and over and over again.
We had fun “rowing” a different book each week and learning new things. One week we rowed “Snowflake Bentley.” Have you ever heard of him? I hadn’t. He is actually a real person by the name of Willie Bentley. He studied snow flakes. Yep, that is right. Snow Flakes. He spent his life studying and photographing them. In 1931 at the age of 66 he had a book published called "Snow Crystals" that shows over 2400 images of snow crystals. He died of pneumonia the same year after walking through 6 miles of snow during a blizzard, trying to capture and photograph more snow crystals.
We baked an apple pie from the recipe listed in the back of How to Make an Apple Pie and see the world. Turned out delicious! We learned how to write Haiku's from Grass Sandals. Big fan favorites in our household were Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel and Katy and the Big Snow. We read them over and over again.
My son and I had many delightful afternoons reading and many of these books are still on our bookshelves today. Check out the book list from Well Read Kid for ages 4 to 8 as well as Goodread's Listopia of five in a row book selections and you'll see what I mean.
Happy Reading!
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