FIAR: The Story About Ping

After rowing our favorite stories, this week we rowed a story from original FIAR curriculum - ‘The Story about Ping.”  It is a classic by Marjorie Flack. It is the story of a duck named ‘Ping’ which lives on a boat roaming in the Yangtze River, China.  Ping has a large family and a master.  Their master let the ducks leave the boat to hunt for food and they return to the boat when the master called them back. The last duck usually gets spank on its back.  One day, Ping run out of the boat to avoid the punishment for being late.  It explores life in the river and reunited with its family the next day.

You can download the pdf of the story here and here.

Here is the summary of our Five in a Row activities.

Language art:

My little one tried reading few sentences.  Then I asked her to mark the words which I dictated.  We also sang the rhyme “5 little ducks went out one day”

We also discussed about the relationships like siblings, cousins, half brother …..

Math:

My little one practiced comparing number values using ping family members. I made a simple worksheet by writing the number of brothers and sisters, father and mother, uncles and aunts, siblings and cousins.  She put the symbols like =, < or > by comparing the number values.

(sorry for the poor quality of  photo)

Art and Craft:

We made some simple Origami boats and my little one drew the eyes to make it a ‘wise eyed boat’. Then, kids enjoyed playing with the boats in rain water.

Science- Buoyancy:

We did a simple experiment on ‘Float or Sink’.  We used wooden scale, rubber duck, plastic container, stainless steel spoons, metal keys and some natural things like leaf, seed, log, stone and tree barks.

In the story, ping was caught by the boy with a barrel on his back.  To explain the use of barrel on the back, first we put a stone in the water tub and it sank.  Then I tied the stone in a plastic container and put it in the water tub and it floated.

Social Studies:

We saw a video ‘Introduction to China in 10minutes”

Identified china - our neighboring nation in the globe and also drew the Chinese flag  - 5 star red flag.

We also discussed about the similarities in the food styles of India and china like rice, rice cakes etc.

and saw the pictures of ‘Yangtze river’ in Google images.

Introducing Money Value to Kids - A Shopping Game

On my little one’s 4th birthday, my dad opened a savings account for her and gave her a piggy bank.  From that day on wards, whenever we gave her money for the piggy bank,   I used to show her the value of the currency before putting it. So, she can recognize most of the coins and how much it worth. I hope this would help her to understand the importance of saving money.

As an extension of our activity on money value, we played a ‘shopping game’   today. I displayed some stationary items and toys along with their prices written in a piece of paper.  I gave her some currency.  She visited ‘my shop’ and purchased few items.  I really loved the way she asked the prices, check the coin values and purchased the items.

We used the kids currency(fake) that i purchased from a local store.  It looks exactly the same as that of Indian rupees except a cartoon image printed in it.