Make way for ducklings

This is the Five in a Row book that we enjoyed, last week. I am planning to make a separate FIAR page to post FIAR activities, from now on. Please check this if you are interested in FIAR.

Please note that my children are quite young, 27 months and 54 months so we have used the easier activities suggested and sometimes used easier activities of my own devising.

Anyway, we "rowed" Make way for ducklings, last week. This is a classic by Robert McCloskey describing the search of a pair of ducks for a nesting place and the travel of the mother with her eight ducklings to a more permanent home. It is set in Boston, USA.

We had read this book before so we didn't go back to Google to look at the sights mentioned in Boston as we had done this not so long ago. This is fun to do as the swan boats mentioned in the book really exist and there is a sculpture of Mrs Mallard and her ducklings.

We read some other duck books: Ping and Webster J Duck. A big bird watchers book, with plenty of illustrations, was much enjoyed.

In addition to reading the book, this is what we did:

Monday: This was a public holiday but we went to our local park to look at the ducklings.

Tuesday: We counted the ducklings in the book. Miss Belle wrote numerals to eight on some paper ducks. Mr Exuberance just stuck ducks that I had numbered in his book.

Wednesday:
We made ducklings. This is easier art than suggested in the book.

Both children painted an outline duck yellow.

Mr Exuberance stuck yellow objects on his duck.

Miss Belle had clear ideas about her creation which is a Mandarin duck. These are occasional visitors to our  park.

Thursday: We talked about our area and how we go to the park and the local library. We made a map of this. Middle son, aged 10, became very interested in this and helped work on this. In retrospect, if I had realised that he would want to join in, we would have done work on scale and used a compass. As it is, the map is quite symbolic. We did "travel" the way to the library with our fingers.

Friday: we talked about the life cycle of the duck and particularly how the duck sits on the eggs in the nest to incubate them. Miss Belle and Mr Exuberance made eggs with ducklings in them. Mr Exuberance's looks neater as he can't cut out yet and needed a fair amount of help.

Miss Belle did her own cutting out and wanted to use a translucent sheet behind the duck so that it could just be seen. She had three layers: pink shell, white duckling and translucent sheet.

Miss Belle and I talked about rhyme as the ducklings names all rhyme: Jack, Mack Ouack etc. I wrote out a set of simple rhyming words.

At the end of the day, we walked in the park again. We didn't see many ducklings but saw plenty of ducks.

Mr Mallard

Mr and Mrs Mallard

Mrs Mallard