FIAR Co-op - The Story About Ping, Part 1

Our real life co-op met for the first time last Friday, and it was sooooo great to be together again! We very much missed Angela and her children (in our co-op last year) since they moved away. We didn't seem quite complete. :-( But it was still great to be with one another, and to have fun learning together. Here we are, 11 children representing 3 families.



We decided that this year while the writer's class is continuing to learn how to write well, we will have a Five In A Row (FIAR) class for the younger children. The concept behind FIAR is that you read the same book at home once each day for five days in a row, and then when we meet on Fridays we will do a variety of activities based on the book. For our first book we chose The Story About Ping ~ one of my favorites!


After reading the story all together, the children took turns arranging picture cards in sequential order and re-telling the story.



Then we did a science activity based on buoyancy. There is a Chinese boat boy in the story who is tied to a barrel to make him float. We looked at a variety of objects and predicted whether they would float or sink.



After we all made our predictions we went outside and set each object one at a time in a bucket of water in order to test our predictions.




We made a mark in the appropriate "sink" or "float" column and compared the actual results with our predictions.



Then we made pictures of the wise eyed boat which was Ping's home, and a few brave souls even colored, cut out, and glued down ALL Ping's relatives ~ which amounted to 68 ducks! We counted while we worked.




It was a marvelous first day back at co-op!