FIAR: Madeline

I think that Madeline is my favorite row to date.

We did this for our second week of school, August 25-29, 2014.

"In an old house in Paris

covered in vines

Lived twelve little girls

in two straight lines..."

Emma found a little surprise on her desk first thing Monday morning.  I ordered this 3-D Eifel Tower puzzle from Amazon, not knowing what to expect.  The brand is Daron, and I was very impressed.  

It is challenging to put together, but in a fun way, and a six year old is completely capable of fully participating.  I was worried I might have to assemble the whole thing and that she would get bored just watching.  She definitely needed supervision and direction, but she helped and stayed interested the entire time.

The end result was awesome, and was used as a centerpiece all week.  It now "lives" permanently on top of the bookshelves in our homeschool room.  It is a very good quality puzzle, and I would order other landmarks in the future to go with other books.

We found so many cute craft projects to go along with Madeline.

The paper flowers were one of my favorites.

(Idea compliments of Delightful Learning.)

Emma did these all by herself.  We used pipe cleaners for stems and buttons for the centers and I think they turned out darling.

The toilet paper tube craft came from Pinterest.  We used tempera paint on ours.

This yellow hat is made from a paper plate, paper bowl, and red ribbon.  She painted with Tempera paints and cut out the center of the plate.  I helped with the hot glue to assemble.  (Again, idea from Pinterest.)

I found a "How To Draw The Eifel Tower" tutorial online to use in our art journal.  To be honest, she didn't love this one, but I think it turned out cute.  She was disappointed that her lines were not perfect, and also that it did not have any color, so we added fireworks in the background.  That seemed to cheer her up a little.

We got LOTS AND LOTS of Madeline books and videos from the library to keep us busy all week.  We had lots of fun with rhyming words in the books, and she was allowed to watch the DVD's in the afternoons when we were finished with school.  This was my favorite book, and we used it to make a cute lap book feature about proper manners.

FOOD was another big element for this row.  One day for lunch we ate the French flag....blue, white, and red.  (Assorted berries, french bread slices with white cheese, and summer sausage slices.)

Emma made a quiche for dinner one night, from our Five In A Row cookbook.  I thought the family would love this....my husband and boys all love ham and eggs, but I was the only one in the entire family who enjoyed it.  Crazy!  How can pie crust be bad???

I absolutely LOVE how much Emma enjoys being in the kitchen.  We cook together a lot, although she often far prefers making the recipes to eating them.  (Sigh!)  Picky, picky!!

This Eifel Tower lunch was a hit.  (Thanks, Pinterest!)

One afternoon I took her to LaMadeleine for lunch.  (She ordered pizza at the french restaurant.)  While there, we happened to see one of my very good friends from high school who I very rarely see, so we all had a lovely lunch together.  That was a wonderful surprise!

My sweet Mom came over one night to make us crepes for dinner.  This is a loooong standing family favorite.  (In our family, we call them egg pancakes, and my German Grandma was legendary for making them.)

The pancake maker is tied to the stove all night while the rest of the family sits around the table eating them up as fast as she can fry them.  My Mom is a great sport!!  This is a holiday tradition for our family, so to have a "reason" to eat them in August created a thrill in our household.  Ha!

After dinner we watched the Madeline movie with Frances McDormand.  Our whole family enjoyed it.

We proudly added our Madeline story disk to our map at the end of this row.  I could have camped here for several more weeks....the Madeline stories are all so sweet.

Another great week in first grade!