The Story About Ping

Monday: We found China and the Yangtze River on the map and saw on the globe that China is WAAAAAYYYY on the other side of the world from us! We did a map worksheet on China that mom got from Enchanted Learning, and we talked about how everything that seems good may not actually be good.



Tuesday: We learned what a 'classic' story is and saw that The Story About Ping is a classic because it was written in 1933 and is still loved by children today. We charted this year, along with all of our birth dates on a timeline. We also learned the difference between 'fiction' and 'non-fiction'.



Wednesday: We looked at the illustrations from Ping and decided that the medium the illustrator used must have been mostly crayons, and that there is a lot of blending of colors in this book. Then we blended colors to make our own Yangtze River on a blank sheet of paper and used a duck stamp and yellow paint to stamp ducks onto our River. 2ds6 then remembered how we talked about how to make it appear that something is in water and he did this to his picture.



Thursday: We started out by placing a duck on our Animal Kingdom poster under 'Vertebrates: Bird', and then we colored a picture of ducks and labeled them either 'duck' for the mommy duck, 'drake' for the daddy duck, and 'duckling' for the baby duck. Then we did a buoyancy experiment where we first poured maple syrup in a clear glass, then added a layer of vegetable oil, then water. We watched as the water and oil traded places, and then dropped in a grape, which floated on the syrup layer, a cork, which floated on the oil level, and a piece of wax candle, which also floated on the oil level but we THOUGHT would float on the water level. Oh well. Such is science, right?



Friday: We went to the parkand fed the ducks. We saw lots of drakes (male ducks) and ducks (female ducks), as well as many ducklings. We even got to watch one fly (while quacking loudly) right over our heads! 3ds5 didn't even know ducks could fly he said! While we were there, we played at the playground for a little while before heading to the local Chinese restaurant to pick up some chopsticks and fortune cookies. They had a HUGE picture of the Great Wall of China, so that was a really cool bonus! We then came home and ate our fortune cookies and home-made Yangtze River lemonade with rubber ducks floating in it to represent Ping and a couple of his family members (we couldn't fit his mother and his father and two sisters and three brothers and eleven aunts and seven uncles and forty-two cousins in the bowl)! We also tried to eat with chopsticks, which everyone but mom learned how to do! 2ds6 had the best idea though... he picked up his piece of hot dog by piercing it with the chopstick! But he did eventually get the hang of how to use them.