Our most recent Five in a Row unit was on the adorable book A Pair of Red Clogs. In the book, the narrator remembers back to her childhood when she had a new pair of shiny red wooden clogs and wore them to play the "weather telling game". The weather telling game consists of kicking your shoe off and seeing how it lands. If it landed right side up, the weather tomorrow would be fair, if upside down, then rainy, and if on its side, it would snow. My children are HUGE fans of the weather telling game. We spent days sending our shoes sailing every time we took them off. It's amazing how many times crocs land on their sides, but alas. no snow in New Orleans in May. ;) We discussed weather, forecasting, and made a chart to record our weather for a week or so. We did several Japanese inspired crafts for this row. I checked out a few origami books from the library. Charlie really liked these and now has a small collection of origami pets that we did together from those books. We also made carp kites and practiced writing our names in Japanese. I used these instructions for the carp kites. Super cute! For Japanese names, I put our names into this translator, printed them out, and then encouraged the kids to copy them with watercolor. They did not really enjoy this, but I thought it was fun! We also made candy "sushi" one day for snack. This was HUGELY popular and I'm sure will be repeated. I used these strange tube shaped rice cakes that we found at Costco, rolled them in fruit roll-ups, and sliced them, and then topped with sweedish fish. I read several other people who made actual Rice Krispie treats to roll for the inside of their faux-sushi, but these were faster. ;) This is a row that I would have loved to spend more time on. We read some good storybooks about Japan, including some compilations of Japanese fairy tales that were very popular, but we did this row around a four-day trip to Houston followed by several days of David being out of town and me single parenting and we just lost focus. Adorable story, fun row, could have done even more with it, but that was a wrap!
