Cranberry Thanksgiving (FIAR)

This is such a great heartwarming story.  We rowed Cranberry Thanksgiving just before Thanksgiving, but I wish we had had more time for this one.  With Thanksgiving coming it got kinda busy, so we didn't get to it all, but we did do some fun things.

Here are some of the stories we had around, including Cranberry Thanksgiving.  This was the first year we read Cranberry Thanksgiving.  I happily added it to our collection.

 We watched Dirty Jobs: Cranberry Farmer which interestingly is filmed at a cranberry farm in Oregon!  The boys loved watching this, so we watched it a few times.  I was glad to find that it was on Netflix so we easily had access to the episode. 

We played this Thanksgiving matching game from make learning fun.

We of course made the cranberry bread recipe from the back of the book.  It turned out delicious, but of course the kids decided they don't like cranberries.

We had fun in a "cranberry bog."

We did some coloring and crafts.  

We learned about the New England states.  This is where a lot of cranberry farms are found, and where the story takes place.  It was a great lesson for the boys to learn about the New England states.  They also learned about how states have 2 letter abbreviations.  We learned all the abbreviations for these states.  We made this poster with some of the things that these states are known for.  This will be where we begin back into the states studies in the new year!  We'll study each state individually.

This is one of the neatest pages in the book.  The shadows of Maggie, Grandmother, and Mr. Whiskers in the firelight eating Thanksgiving pie.

So we attempted to create a similar scene with each boys shadow profile.

They did a pretty good job.  Bottom left is Alex's, bottom right is Aric's, and the top middle picture is Aaron's.  The other 2 pictures are just creations that they came up with while painting their fire background.

Just before we left for Grandma's house we had some science mixing fun with our soda bottle test tubes.  The kids kept asking what we could mix up in them, so I came up with a fun little random activity that sort of ties into thanksgiving.

I grabbed various items from the pantry.  I tried to think of items that would be found in thanksgiving dishes, but I didn't have everything, so I just grabbed whatever I thought would be interesting in a mixture of some sort.

I had (from left to right) sixlets, popcorn kernels, vanilla pudding, pecans, marshmallows, brown sugar, jell-o, candy corn, oatmeal, and vanilla.

There's really no rhyme or reason to this, it was just a fun we're ready to go but lets do something sciency and almost gross before our thanksgiving break type activities.

I let them choose to add to any test tube: syrup, water, cranberry juice, and milk.

You know what, they loved it.  We predicted what would happen to each food before they added in the liquid.

They each had a turn.

Here's the results.  Syrup was the most popular liquid to add.

We all thought the candy corn looked the coolest.

We also did a lapbook from Homeschool share for Cranberry Thanksgiving, but for some reason I have no pictures of it.  Maybe I'll add them later.  

This was yet another great five in a row study!

  I'm linking this up with Delightful Learning's five in a row volume 1 link up.

 
Desiree