Kinder Days....: The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge FIAR Study

Hi! What a Fun study we had this past week! We have all been looking forward to this book for a few months now, and we were not dissapointed!

First published in 1942, this well-loved story about a Manhattan lighthouse who's feeling overshadowed by his new "big brother" (the George Washington bridge)

As the bright-red lighthouse watches the gigantic gray bridge go up overhead--equipped with its own fog-penetrating lights, no less!--the spirited little guy starts to feel pretty inadequate. But with some gentle reassurance, the wise steel bridge convinces him that we all have a purpose we can take pride in. ("I call to the airplanes," cried the bridge. "I flash to the ships of the air. But you are still master of the river. Quick, let your light shine again. Each to his own place, little brother!") amazon review.

Our first lesson was about Pride, There were a few great lesson from the Bible charachter book by FIAR, that we did...

I picked up several go alongs from the library this week.

The lighthouse Book
lighthouses a pop up gallery (yard sale find)
Rivers and Lakes
The River Nile
Rivers of the world : The Rhine
It's my state! New York
Lady Liberty A biography (I recomend it for a bit older kids 8 and up)
Timelines Ships Sailors and the Sea
Geography for Fun Rivers and Seas easy geography projects
The Story of the Statue of Liberty

This is a great book! It talked of the earliest Lighthouses,

to some of the first lighthouses,

Egypt.

We also loved the picture below, of what the inside of the lighthouses look like.

For ART we discused how the artist, Lynd Ward, used only 3 colors for the entire book!

We then drew some of our own pictures using just 3 colors...

This was a huge hit!

A beautiful book, with full stories and details of each lighthouse. JT recognized some of these by their names from our new lighthouse bingo!

I think have decided that BINGO is one of my favorite teaching games. It's easy, and each "theme" you get, really helps with memory skills etc. This particular game, has real photographs of famous lighthouses around the world. And on the back of each card it tells you about that lighthouse. On the front is it's name and where it's located. My 4 year old even memorized several of them by the 10th game or so! =) yes, we played this ALOT this week!

We were also amazed to learn that the Statue of Liberty was used as one of the first lighthouses! (homeschool is good for mama too!)

I printed off a GEO-safari card on differant boats from homeschoolshare. We love our Geo-safari ( thanks grandma!) and I was impressed i could even print some out online for free! JT had so much fun naming the differant kinds of boats we learned about all week....

One of the studies we did was on Personification. We drew faces on our lighthouses. this is Kt's but her marker wasn't working very good... they enjoyed re-looking through the book to find the differant face expresions on the lighthouses and the boats...in the story...

Here are a few we drew ourselves!

Part of our science continued on Rivers......

Since the Nile is the largest river, we read about that as well..

And of course since we are living here in Germany, we read about the Famous River Rhine. And We also took a little visit to the Rhine this week!

Sunday we went up to Frankfurt.. and had a great view of the Rhine!

For Geography, off to the East coast again... NEW YORK!

We lightly covered New York... Mostly just the study of the Statue of Liberty, and the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge....

The library didn't have any books in on bridges, I wish We could have looked at more of those...

Sunday, We took a day trip to Frankfurt to visit the Kindermuseum. While there we stopped to visit the Rhine river, and a small version of a GReat GRey Bridge =)

The kids were thrilled to see this bridge!!

We walked from one side of the river to the other, talking about how big the Great Grey bridge must be, and how much steel, and time went into building it...

(did you know the Rhine is also one of the dirtiest rivers in the world?)

We also studied about all kinds of Ships, Boats, etc...

Name that boat!!! This page was front and back with differant boats we studied.

Kyree was very excited to see this Barge go through the river... She was very Proud of herself for guessing the name. =)

And a Ferry Boat... JT called this one out! they really wanted to ride it, but there wasn't time that day...

Nice view....

some more lapbook fun.

The kindermusuem was nice. It was very small. And the focus this year was on light. Everythign about "light" So it was interesting. The kids of course had a nice time. I personally wouldn't drive that far for just this museum though... but it would make a nice break in the day if you were already in town for the zoo, or the dinosaur museum....

the kids putting on a shadow show for mommy! I sat in my own theatre seats too!

JT loved it!

JT drawing a Silouette of Kyree.... another fun "light" feature

here, they had shapes in the middle of the table. with 4 differant lights you could turn on to get differant shadows of each object. Then you were to draw the shadow shape one object....

KT sat down right away, and didn't stop till she was finished.....

her shape was an egg shape from the blue ball.

As we were leaving they had an old vintage General store that the kids could pretend "shop" in. This was the hit of the day, and one of the reasons i had been wanting to visit this museum. They have all kinds of cool things for the kids to play with. My kids looooove pretend play like this... we spent an hour here. =)

they had a real working vintage cash register, and they gave you bags of coins to pay with...