Children of The Church: Our Adventures with Before Five in A Row

I cannot believe how much fun we are having starting to do the Before Five in A Row Curriculum again! Bringing it back out this year I was assuming that I would use it focusing on our 3 (almost 4 year old) and 2 year old, but I am surprised how much our 5 1/2 year old is loving it as well! This week we rowed the classic story Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina. It is a silly story about a peddler who is selling caps and decides to go and take a nap in the country. While he is napping near a tree monkeys take ALL of his caps except for one. The peddler tries many things to get his caps back from the monkeys and finally gets them back and continues on his way by the end of the story. Here are a few things that we did this week to learn more about our reading comprehension and fun!

Our two year old is loving participating and listening to the stories and truly feeling like he is part of our school time with the big kids. We found a little monkey costume that we have and acted out the story of the monkeys taking the peddler's caps. Our three year old thought that dressing up as a monkey was pretty fun as well and he also went around our basement finding as many caps has he could and then counted them all (he found a total of 11)!

Our next activity was aimed at our 5 1/2 year old and he LOVED it! He has been learning to count by 2s, 5s and 10s in his Seton math book and also learning about money so we took out caps and had a sale with his brothers. In the story the peddler sold his caps for $0.50 so our son's job was to pay his brothers with different combinations of $0.50 for each cap. He counted out 50 pennies and put them in groups of 10, counted out 10 nickels, 5 dimes and 2 quarters! He really had a lot of fun working on his math skills with this game and applying it to the story.

Another activity that we did this week was playing a fun game of Simon Says or Monkey See Monkey Do! In the story the peddler gets frustrated and he points at the monkeys and they just point back at him. Then the peddler stops his feet because he is so frustrated about the monkeys having his caps and the monkeys just stop their feet back. Finally, the peddler is about to just walk away and he throws the one cap that he has on his head down on the ground and the monkeys all throw their caps down from the tree! Our kids all had such a fun time both receiving and giving instructions to copy with this game. Since our 2 year old has recently learned all of his body parts and basic skills like jumping, etc he thought this game was especially fun!

We continued expanding on our lessons using Homeschool Connections Literature Based Printables and had a great time matching rhyming words, working on what letter different words start with, etc. Our 3 1/2 year old especially loves these activities and working on his basic skills.

When we start the week reading the story for the first time I have been reading it aloud to everyone, but as we progress throughout the week our 5 1/2 year old reads more of the book aloud to his brothers. I will read a page and then he will read a page and we go back and forth. This has been so great for him to practice his reading skills and increase his confidence with reading! I love that most of the books in the Before Five in a Row and Five in a Row curriculum are at a pretty basic reading level.

The peddler in the story carries all of the caps on top of his head has to balance them all as he walks around to sell them. We did a fun, simple physical activity of trying to stand up straight and walk while balancing a book. The boys were surprised how difficult this was to do!

Also, one page of the book talks about the peddler looking to the left, right, up and down when he was searching for his caps. We have learned directions in the past with the big kids, but we reviewed them this week and our oldest was teaching his brothers how you can make an "L" with your left hand to identify which direction is which!

One thing that we have been working on with our 2 year old is learning his colors, so we did this again this week as the peddler had black, brown, grey, blue and red hats. We have color flashcards that I laminated a few years ago that I keep stored together to bring out and review as each child is learning their colors. We also have these laminated flashcard sheets that I made for numbers, letters, seasons, shapes and more.

Finally, we also took a visit to the zoo after reading Caps for Sale one day to watch real life monkeys and their behavior. The monkeys are so much fun to watch to see how they all interact and play and we had a great time. It was especially a fun zoo visit because traditional school has started back in session in our city so it felt like we had the zoo to ourselves. Perfect for some hands on learning!