The Rag Coat and Changes in Plans

For our first week back, we read The Rag Coat. Looking back, maybe it was a little too low key for the first week. It's a nice book with a great message, but it's kind of like starting a concert with a slow, lyrical piece instead of a fanfare. I like to think in musical terms : )

 First we learned about the geography from the story- the Appalachian Mountains. The kids decorated the area on a map.

The little girl's father dies from lung disease since he was a coal miner, so we read Growing Up in Coal Country. Well, I read it beforehand since I found it completely fascinating and then I shared some of the facts and pictures with them. Teaching them about different ways of life is wonderful, but it often shows how good they really have it. They can't comprehend this since they've never known hardship. Who knows what the future will bring, but I pray they will always have at least the things they need, and most of all faith to stick with God no matter what.
 
Now here's where I got off track a little. Originally, I had planned to have them make a simple quilt this week- we've also recently read the Quiltmaker books. We checked out a book about prairie quilts for children and my intent was to let them pick a design and understand that each quilt block had a meaning behind it. They were completely uninterested in the blocks and just wanted to make a quilt. Once we gathered our material, they decided to go their own direction and draw out their own designs. I didn't want to discourage them so I let them go ahead. Well guidance turned out to be more necessary than their freedom to explore. In fact, it was a mess. And they weren't so able to learn to measure and cut even the simplest pieces. Just too many steps for this project at their age. So I regrouped that evening and was careful not to beat myself up- not everything is going to be perfect and that's why this is all a good experience for me, too.

Switching gears, several bloggers had done this, so we followed it, too. The kids cut up scrap paper and decorated their own rag coat. The book also mentions Joseph and his many-colored coat and that happened to line up with our Bible stories.

On music day, we had some fun. Dax grew up in East Tennessee, and I went to school there with him, so we have some ties to the region and it's music. After some searching, I discovered that Dolly Parton had actually performed a song (on YouTube) about the girl with the rag coat. It turns out the book was written in response to that song! What a great thing for the kids to watch. We promised them they'd get to Dollywood sometime in their lives since so many relatives live near there. Chloe especially like Dolly. Then of course we had to dance to our school's song- Rocky Top!! 

 On Thursday, we headed to the library for school time. They have some awesome study rooms with lots of windows and we had to get there early to grab one of them. While we waited, Chloe and Colin introduced themselves to another patron, Betty. They cheer up people wherever they go, those two. Hannah tends to hang back with me, but the younger ones are eager to share names, ages, and life stories.

                              We set up shop. Colin was entertained by DinoCheckers for awhile : )

 After spelling time, I decided the basics of quilt making could still be addressed as part of math, so the girls learned to draw exact squares on graph paper, both tracing and using a ruler.

                                     Then they worked with tangram shapes for awhile.

                                                            Hannah's tangram girl.

 On Friday, we read two other stories about quilts. One was The Keeping Quilt about a Jewish immigrant family who passed it down through generations of weddings and births. The other was Under the Quilt of Night about the slaves on the Underground Railroad who spotted particular quilts hung out on fences showing them safe havens on their way to freedom. The kids really liked that one and the artwork was beautiful. It's amazing that one piece of sewn cloth can represent so many facets of American culture and history.

To include some more experiential aspects of the book, we did a little coal-mining reenactment.
We did not have a construction helmet, nor a flashlight that worked. :/ So they used a knight's helmet and an iphone. Talk about mixing cultures. They each headed down a tunnel into the master closet, where I closed them in the dark.

 Their job was to use their tiny light to find 8 pieces of coal (black magnetic rocks) in the bucket and then crawl back out.

                            The blue gravel rubbed off, so I guess that was the realistic part. : )

They also received all sorts of materials to create their own rag doll like the girl in the book.
I tried to stay out of the picture to see what they came up with and both ended up choosing buttons and markers.

Not so much the more traditional result I expected, but hey, they adore these dolls and have been playing with them nonstop- and isn't that the point? : )

My favorite quote from one of my favorite movies "You've Got Mail" : ) is... "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?"  I want that to be true in life so much. The way we can begin at school is to try and make aspects of a book come alive in hopes that some day we'll begin to turn it around and create stories of our own.

Our field trip for the week was to visit a quilt shop, but I was suddenly uninspired by that. We already have a few quilts at home and I was probably going to spend most of the time saying "don't touch!"  I had the urge to make our field trip a lot bigger- and was feeling kind of measly after the whole knight's helmet, closet experiment even though they had fun. I found out that Inner Space Cavern was the closest cave to us- about 3 hours away. I texted Dax at work and asked if he'd be willing to leave for Austin as soon as he got home. Good-natured Dax wrote back, "sure." The kids were extremely excited to stay in a hotel that night. You should have heard the squeals and screams and endless questions. For their first time altogether, they did great and hardly had any trouble going to bed. (And I got a nice long bath with a book).

The next morning the kids were super excited to go underground like the miners. Chloe kept asking if there was going to be lava and wouldn't be convinced we weren't deep enough for that. Hannah was excited to walk by herself and be independent. Colin was very good, too, but was mostly concerned about his shoes getting muddy : )

                                                 100 years per cubic inch of stalactite.

                                             Do you see a sumo wrestler eating ice cream?

 This is the room where the cave was first discovered. Folks checking the ground before the construction of I35 drilled into this space. They lowered a worker down on a drill bit, who saw the large rock next to him and yelled for help thinking it was a bear. Honestly, the tour guide was so full of corny jokes, it was hard to tell fact from fiction most of the time.

                I'm happy this turned out to be a successful last minute idea.  My family explored several caves growing up and I've always felt really happy and at peace down there. Maybe I need to take up some real spelunking.