FIAR Co-op - A Pair of Red Clogs, Part 1

I had looked forward all fall to teaching this book! Some of you may not know that I lived in Japan for 2.5 years many moons ago (pre-marriage). It was an amazing and unforgettable chapter of my life, that I am so grateful for! And since A Pair of Red Clogs takes place in Japan, I quickly volunteered to teach it!

You have seen many pictures like this one, on this very couch, all of us reading together. But I never get tired of them (sorry if you do!), since reading with children has been one of my favorite things to do since I was barely a teenager, and it yields so many wonderful benefits!



We thoroughly enjoyed the book together and then discussed some of the cultural aspects of Japan, just whatever the children asked and what stood out to me as a memory that I wanted to share.


In the story, the main character, Masako, and her friends play a weather-telling game. So we talked about weather words and used this old chart from my days as a classroom teacher to describe what the weather that day was like. Each of the children took home a weather picture sheet to fill out during the week and bring back the following Friday.


A big part of the story is how Masako initially makes a decision to be deceitful in an effort to get a new pair of clogs, but how she becomes ashamed of her deceit and purposes to always be honest. We looked up verses in the Bible that talk about honesty, and then put the references in our FIAR notebooks.




We also played a clog-matching card game (similar to Go Fish) and looked at a few of my Japanese souvenir type things I had brought. It was a fun morning!