Sonlight is our main curriculum, but I am very excited to have the opportunity to get together with 3 other families to row one book a month this year. For our first book, we rowed Little Nino's Pizzeria. We met at my house for Art and Science and then went on a field trip to a local pizzeria to make our own pizza.
The illustrations in the book are bright, lively, and colorful, and are reminiscent of Henri Matisse, so I chose the suggestion in the manual to do a study on Matisse for our art lesson.
I read that Matisse liked to make his own colors by painting large sheets of paper and then using that for his cut out collages, so I had the kids start out by mixing paint to make their own colors for a collage.
I talked a little about Matisse while the kids painted and showed them some of his artwork.
They didn't quite get to the concept of painting the whole sheet of paper, but they had fun painting! We were supposed to let them dry for making cut-out collages, but we ran out of time.
Boaz (21 months) napped the whole time, so I had him paint when he woke up.
And later, Malachi made a Matisse-like collage using the Art Activity Pack: Matisse.
Inspiration: Cut-Paper Play!, Come Look with Me: Enjoying Art with Children,
Our second activity was a Science lesson on Nutrition, put on by my friend, Amy. She read a book on nutrition (can't remember the name), and had each kid make a Nutrition Book outlining the Food Groups.
They either colored or cut and pasted foods cut out from magazines.
Then, my friend, Kim, did a Science lesson on yeast. (This is my reason for choosing this book - because of the "Dough" experiment in Sonlight Week 10! On our own, we read Science Activities Vol. 2 p. 42-43 and learned how yeast works.)
We did the yeast in a balloon demonstration and watched the effects of the yeast producing carbon dioxide to blow up the balloon.
Then, Kim led us in a yeast experiment on using different types of sugars/starches to see which encouraged yeast growth the best.
We used sugar, corn syrup, and corn starch. And then the scientist in me suggested we throw in a control with just yeast and water.
Then the jars were placed in a warm water bath and we waited for the yeast to grow!
Can you guess which worked the best?
Then the kids (who really wanted to play by now!) got to go play while I got our snack ready.
Italy
We didn't have a Social Studies lesson planned, so I decorated with a flag of Italy pennant.
We made Italian Flag Fruit Pizzas.
And had Italian Cream Sodas.
During our second get-together, we went on a. . .
Field Trip to Make Our Own Pizzas!
After having the kids wash their hands, the owner had each child grab a handful of dough right out of the huge mixer. Then, they dropped it into a machine to flatten it and finally into the pizza pan to be pressed, trimmed, and rolled with a tool to make air holes.
Then they got to add their choice of toppings to their pizza.
And put it in the oven!
They were anxiously waiting on the other end to watch their pizza come out of the big oven and then have it sliced and put on a plate. (I got to make my own, too!)
I got a group pic of us all eating our pizza, but can't share it for privacy reasons. But, it was fun to see so many kids together eating pizza!
We used Pizza Toppers for the toppings. They just wanted to decorate their pizza, so I had to coax them into the fractions lesson. :)
Homophones
For our study of homophones, I was just going to have them have them make up a sentence using the homophones need and knead, but we also got to review Hot Dots Laugh It Up! Vocabulary Homophone Cards.
Little Nino's Pizzeria is a Five in a Row selection from Volume 3.
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