Five in a Row-Papa Piccolo by Carol Talley

This row took two weeks. We had a lot going on medically (see here for more info) plus Labor Day holiday so it didn’t flow as nicely as previous two did. I like doing it in one week because it makes it easier to stay focused on the story and culture. Oh well. The next two books I have planned will also take two weeks because of “life” so I will just have to adjust. Most of the activities are straight from the manual. I will list our activities by subject since we didn’t do it daily:

Social studies & History
We read the story and placed our story disk on Venice, Italy. We looked back through the book and talked more about Venice itself. We discussed what we would like and dislike about living there (with all the water). Then we watched youtube videos of Venice and gondola rides and singing gondoliers.

Language arts
We read the book and learned some of the vocabulary words and Italian words in the book. The girls pretended to ride a gondola to my café where I served biscotti and hot chocolate. We pretended to be Italian and used some of the words we had just learned. The cookbook had a recipe for biscotti but I just purchased some at the grocery store.

Character Study (sorta)
The weather was beautiful (finally!) so we ate an Italian snack outside (fruit with Nutella) and said lots of Italian words. We read the book again and talked about Papa Piccolo teaching the kittens and then talked about what their dad has taught them (riding a bike, washing their hair, etc). They got distracted so we didn’t get to finish our discussion.

For lunch we had an Italian grilled cheese sandwich (pesto, provolone, and mozzarella) which we dipped in marinara.

That afternoon, we watched Venice City Guide on Globe Trekker on PBS. I would recommend the first 5-10 minutes (tour of city) and last 10 minutes (shows regatta). There were some inappropriate discussions for kids (gondolier telling what adults like to do on his boat) but luckily Abby wasn’t really paying much attention and I had the sound turned down pretty low.

Another day we were watching Barney on PBS and he went to Venice.

Art
We read the book and named all the colors on the 2 page spread in front of book (and made up our own names-golden yellow, sunshine yellow, etc).

We got out watercolors and made a color wheel and mixed the colors to make new ones. Then we made our own paintings. Except I didn’t know how to use tube watercolors-I didn’t add water! Oh well. Our paintings turned out lovely anyway.

That night we ate spaghetti by candlelight and made the ricotta cake from the cookbook. It was delicious! Daddy sang “That’s Amore” to us and pretended to speak Italian. The girls thought it was hilarious. Abby spontaneously reviewed all she had learned-she just started giving vocabulary words and definitions and talking about Venice. I was glad to know she had learned something!

Applied math
We skipped math this time!

Science!
I did milk/food coloring experiment that I found here. You place one drop of each color of food coloring on milk then touch it with dish soap on q-tip. The colors dance all over the milk! The girls loved it!

That was our last day of Papa Piccolo so we had pizza for dinner (and leftover ricotta cake) to celebrate. Daddy pulled up Venice on Google Earth and they looked at that for a while.

I had many other ideas for this book but with all the stress of our life right now, this was the best I could manage.

Our 3 R’s are still going well. The only problem is handwriting-she hates to do handwriting! I am not ready to switch programs yet but I may have to if this continues.

For the next two weeks we will be “rowing” How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World! I have some great stuff planned plus we will be going on our first home school field trip!