FIAR-The Story About Ping

 This week's row was The Story About Ping. We learned about ducks and China. Lily was excited about this. She has told me before that China is her favorite country.

The first thing I did was print out some Chinese symbols, so Lily could see that they don't have the same letters and numbers as we do. I didn't expect her to memorize them, I just wanted her to see them.

I printed out her name in Chinese. She was confused by this one. She expected there to be a symbol to represent every letter of her name, and there wasn't. (We did her full name)

I have a Muzzy online subscription. We usually watch it in French, but Mandarin was actually one of the choices, so I let Lily and the daycare kids watch it in Mandarin this time.

We colored some Chinese dragons and made lanterns for our arts and crafts. We also painted with water color paints. 

We discussed some of the many things that originate from China. Tangrams, Dominos, Paper and the Abacus. We looked at a few of these things this week.

In our Singapore math, we are talking about weight and balance, so we got out our balance and counters, and we played around with the abacus for some math fun.

We put together a GeoPuzzle of Asia. We also looked up China on a map and the globe.

The cooking projects were a lot of fun (and tasty!) this week. The first thing we made was chicken fried rice. It was much easier than I expected. For lunch that day, we had the rice, mandarin oranges, and fortune cookies.

We made egg drop soup. Again, very easy and yummy. My child-the pickiest eater on the planet, asked for seconds!

 We discussed ducks-what they eat, where they live, why they don't get wet, and how they float. This led to some interesting science. We did a sink/float experiment:

We also did an experiment with oil and water, and discussed how ducks have oil on their feathers to keep them from getting wet. We did an experiment to show what would happen if paper was covered in oil and dipped in water, or just dipped in water without the oil.

 In the book, Ping almost got into trouble by following the crumbs of a rice cake and eating it. We went to the lake and fed the ducks some rice cakes.

I found a Pandora station that has traditional Chinese music, so we listened to a lot of that this week while doing our art and eating our Chinese food. This was a fun book. We both really enjoyed this one. Next up? Ants!