Saturday, April 4, 2009

The Duchess Bakes a Cake

Our FIAR book this week was The Duchess Bakes a Cake, by Virginia Kahl. This is the story of a duchess who decides to bake a cake and keeps throwing in extra yeast to make sure it rises--and it does. It is written in rhyme, so Jack really enjoyed listening to it multiple times.

We used some of the same books that we used last year when we learned about knights and castles. We added a couple of new Good Knight books, which are some of Jack's favorites.

Thanks to the workbox system we've been using the last month (and that I really am going to post about at some point), we are doing more felt board activities. I made this one to go over alliteration.

Another change we've made recently is to put all of our things in a notebook instead of using file folders for individual lapbooks. It is easier for Jack to look back through the things he's done this way and for some reason I seem to get the items glued in more quickly than I do with a regular lapbook. Jack decorated the pages we did this week with some of the leftover stickers from our unit last year.

Some of the art lessons we did.

A few other items. I used the printables from HomeschoolShare.

We also baked our own cake from scratch. I originally had an idea to build some ornate kind of 3D castle cake. After a bit of thinking, I decided I would maybe just cut the cake into the shape of a castle and we would frost it and decorate it. Then I couldn't get the cake out of the pan, so I thought I would draw a castle with icing and we could go from there. I finally came to my senses and let Jack frost it (he got tired after doing a small section) and decorate it how he wanted to, which probably averted fits for both of us. We also made fancy "goblets" by gluing plastic jewels onto clear cups. He thought this was pretty cool.

We wrapped up our week with a trip to the Medieval Fair. He really enjoyed this last year and decided about a week ago that he was going to wear his knight costume.

As soon as we got there (which was after a really long walk from the parking area) he found someone to challenge to a fight. Yes, that's our stroller you see there. Thankfully I was smart enough to realize that at seven months pregnant I did not want to carry a tired four year old or even the belongings of a tired four year old. I did have to do some heavy lifting to help him get out, though, because his legs are much longer than the last time we used it--which was October of 2007 if the magazine I found in the basket is to be believed.

Showing off his new hat.

We listened to these musicians while Jack ate his sno cone.

Later, we watched jousting...

...and sword fighting while Jack ate a giant corn dog. It's a good thing I passed my glucose test, or I would have had to feel bad about the funnel cake and Dr. Pepper I had for lunch. You just can't beat that olde medieval foode.

Of course, Jack found dogs. He always does.

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