FIAR - Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

As we prepared for a new school year, I was faced with a slight predicament.  S7 was able to read her first readers, and needed something harder to challenge her.  Normally I would start her on FIAR, having her read parts and me reading parts.  But I wanted to use BFIAR with some FIAR books with B5 and A3 to go with Geography.  After a little finagling, I decided to add her to the littles' school, but shorten the time on each book.  We would only do the books for a week, and require more from her, even if it was just reading comprehension type activities.  Essentially, I decided to stick with the actual FIAR curriculum for S7 and add the littles in for the extra fun activities that would be for all three of them.

Since we had already read "How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World" while introducing the basics of Geography, it was time to move on to the Arctic circle and then Antarctica.  Unfortunately, there are not any books for either area, per se.  So for FIAR, we stuck with books within the snowing theme :)  First up was "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost.


This poem was difficult for me, to begin with!  This was one of my favorite poems, in both high school and college, to analyze.  This of course is not the intention for the littles!  Reading it literally, which ironically is how Frost intended it, was actually quite fun!  The drawings in the book were great openings for questions and examination!  Some of our additional activities were:

• Writing our own animal poem - S7's was:

I am a koala.

I can climb trees.

I can feel my baby in my pouch,

I feel it searching for food. 

I smell eucalyptus leaves.

I love to sleep during the day.

I was created by God.

I am a koala

• Drawing our own picture
• Looking at the illustrations of the man feeding the wildlife
• Preparing food and water for wildlife - we filled our birdbath and made a bird feeder out of a yogurt container

• Looking at the tracks in the illustrations
• Making a plaster of our dog's paw print (she did NOT like this!)
• Making tracks in play doh
• Talking about nocturnal animals
• Collect pine cones and make fire starters

While searching for pinecones, the kids were quite excited to find this spider carrying her egg sack!

• Play animal tracks matching game
• Listen for nocturnal animals after dark - we had an owl living in the woods behind us that we LOVED listening to every night!!!

We also read some additional books to go along with these activities, including:

• Animals in Winter, by Henrietta Bancroft
• Footprints in the Snow, by Cynthia Benjamin
• Big Tracks, Little Tracks, by Millicent E. Selsam
• Out of Sight Till Tonight, by Tish Rabe
• Where Are the Night Animals?, by Mary Anne Fraser 

Per the suggestion of the FIAR cookbook, we made Chicken Pie for dinner with Peach Crisp.  Yummy!

With the children's interest peaked in finding and listening to animals, we were blessed by God to have a chance to see a few extra animals over the next few days.  An eagle came and perched in a tree behind our house, and then a deer came and ate the berries off the tree right behind the fence.  The pictures are not the clearest, but you should be able to make them out.  I love how God blesses us with things at just the right time!!!