Family Relationships and Rainbows

I love when units just come together all on their own! Originally, this unit was going to be on two Frances books: Bedtime for Frances and Sister for Frances.

The day before I hopped on my library's website to reserve these books, I was doing a rough sketch of our educational future Pre-K - 12th, just to see if I could get an idea of how I want things to look. . . not totally detailed plans or anything, just a game plan of sorts. The more I read and learn, the more I have realized that I don't think I will be following a boxed curriculum. There are several companies that I absolutely love and will use their resources as supplements, and will always consider moving to one of their "box sets" if needed, but I just don't think that is the path I am being led down. So, for my own sanity purposes, I wanted to see what was in this head of mine, if I could come up with what I would want them to cover if it was totally up to me. I plan on using this rough sketch as an outline, pulling in tons of great living books and really relying on the methods in The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach and Real Learning.

Anyway, I was doing this rough sketch and started looking at the book list that Elizabeth Foss provided in the back of Real Learning. I hadn't heard of many of these books before, so I did a quick Amazon search on the books listed for the K-2nd grade years. I ended up finding some awesome books by Molly Bang and Charlotte Zolotow that I just had to dive into right away! Many talked about sibling relationships (went with our Sister for Frances theme) as well as enjoying being little (Jordan was on a kick where she was trying to act like an adult and I thought this would be a great way to show her the joys of childhood), relationships with parents and more! These books were all at my library so before I knew it, we had ourselves a brand new unit!

I pulled books we owned as well and some fun videos we have (like the best siblings in the world Charlie and Lola, as well as Big Sister Dora and others). The girls LOVED this unit and these books! Our absolute favorites were: When Sophie Gets Angry-- Really, Really Angry by Molly Bang (we still have this book because it is such a hit!), If It Weren't For YOU by Charlotte Zolotow, I Like To Be Little by Zolotow, and The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. As you can see, there were TONS of books for this unit :-)

At the same time I was requesting all of these books from the library, I was also trying to request Rainbow of my Own for another week unit that I had planned. Unfortunately, our library did not carry this title, BUT it did have several other books on rainbows and colors that looked fun! So I went ahead and requested those, planning on having this be a separate unit. When I got all of the books home, however, the girls looked really interested in the rainbow titles and I decided to do a separate science unit at the same time as our other units. All of these books are being kept in a basket in the living room and we are talking about these casually over several weeks. It is going great!

In our Science Basket on Rainbows and Colors, we have Meet Rainbow Sherbet -- this is a Strawberry Shortcake book and the girls are just loving her right now lol, Run to the Rainbow -- this is an easy reader type book, not great in my opinion but the girls like it, Planting a Rainbow -- this is also a great book to use for a gardening unit, Maisy's Rainbow Dream -- has to be Cali's favorite book right now by far, and Rainbow Brite And The Big Color Mix-Up -- this was MY book when I was little and Jordan loves this! For videos we have watched my old episodes of Rainbow Brite (thanks, mom!) and My Little Ponies (this happened to be right after Rainbow Brite and it has a rainbow necklace in it so since the girls like it, we are going with it!). There is also the Magic School Bus episode Makes a Rainbow.

For fun, we watched Peter Pan because the girls had never seen it before. . . it was so fun to see that not only did it happen to include the topic of not wanting to grow up (enjoying being children) but it also has a rainbow by the mermaid lagoon that both girls picked up on so quickly!

We ended the week with a family trip with MamaRosie and Crawdaddy (that would be my parents) to San Antonio. A very successful week!