FIAR- Katy and the Big Snow

Even though we live in Thailand, we like to pretend it gets cold here.  So during our "winter" we pull out all of our snowy books.  The Thais do call this winter, which is really funny because the coldest it gets here is in the low 70's but daily temps are still in the upper 80's to 90's!

So, with all the major storms hitting the States over the past few weeks, we decided to row Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton .  This is a cute story about a snow plow named Katy that saves the city after being snowed in.

                                         


Map Reading and Street Signs

We first looked at the city of Geopolis map in the book.  We found the compass and noticed the direction Katy had to drive on every page.  So we pulled out our atlas and it had a great introduction page on how to read maps.  The boys learned about street view and bird's eye view and how to read the map key. Then, they worked on a worksheet that explained the meanings of the street signs colors. Then they had to put the street signs in the correct places on the maps.  We noticed that street sign colors in the States are pretty similar to the street sign colors in Thailand.  Red, yellow, & green seem to be universal, but the other colors do vary.  After we finished learning about the street signs, we made our own compass from a bar magnet and a bowl of water.  We were pretty amazed at how accurate it was.  We tested it with the compass on my phone and it worked perfectly.  Note to self...keep bar magnet in purse in case of getting stranded.

Geography

We worked on understanding the concept of our place in the world. I have done this project a couple times in the past and think it is so great that we did it again this year.  Britton could actually understand it this time.  In the past, we have used Thailand as our home, but this time we used the United States.  I still want them to understand where they used to live. It's good for them to think of both places as home.

Community Helpers

We noticed all the community helpers that were in Katy and the Big Snow, so we read a book about community helpers and talked about helpers we see in our neighborhood that we may not have seen back in America.  In our neighborhood we have a lot of guards at all the gates, street sweepers, gardeners,and neighborhood maintenance crews.  I also found a you tube video on community helpers from Sesame Street.  My older two boys groaned when I turned this on, but by the end they were laughing and actually enjoyed it.

I found some community helper paper puppets and had all 3 boys color different ones.  Then they had to plan out a city and work together to draw it and make sure each community helper had their own space in the city.  I really need to incorporate more team projects because they had so much fun planning and helping each other draw their buildings.  Three weeks after rowing this book and our city is still laying on the floor in the school room.  They loved this!

Go Along Books

We read some great go along books on snow to tie the whole unit together.  We read about "Snowflake" Bentley, who was the first man to take a photograph of a snowflake.  This got us interested in how snowflakes form.  We watched a couple videos on how a snowflake forms.  We also read "The Big Snow" and this book explained all about what animals stay in the winter and which animals migrate.  We tried making our own snowflakes out of baking soda (same idea as salt crystals) but it was a flop.  I need to figure out what I did wrong.

Snow Day in Thailand

One morning I noticed all my friends back home were posting about school cancellations due to the snow, so we decided to have our very own Thai style snow day.  We declared it was a pajama day and had hot chocolate during snack time.  I turned on our "fireplace" while we snuggled up and read our chapter book of the week.  We played in shaving cream snow, built a snowman that kept melting and we even got to taste snowflakes.

We really enjoyed our time bringing winter to Thailand.

Check out two years ago when we rowed Katy and the Big Snow for the first time.  This is only an album on our facebook page.  This was before I was blogging about FIAR.  Look how much the boys have changed!

Facebook Album

Inspirations:

My Pinterest page on Katy and the Big Snow
Community Helper Puppets
Me on the Map circle book
Traffic Sign Worksheets

Linking up with Delightful Learning's FIAR Vol. 1 Link-up