Elena 
Our Co-op is using books as part of the Five in a Row Curriculum.
In Five in a Row, the idea is to read the book to the child for five days in a row. Each time the child gets more familiar with the book and illustrations. When done in a co-op setting, the parent reads the book to the child four times, and then we read it for the last time in class and do projects and follow rabbit trails related to the book.
We read How to Bake a Cherry Pie and See the USA!
What the Book is about:
This is a delightful book written and illustrated by Marjorie Priceman. Imagine if you will, that you want to bake a delicious cherry pie for the Fourth of July Holiday, but the town’s Cook shop is closed! What do you do? Travel around the country to get all of the raw materials to make your own equipment of course! And you won’t travel in a logical straight line either! This story takes us to New York to get a cab, to Ohio for coal to make a steel pie pan, all the way to Hawaii for sand to make a glass measuring cup, and then to Vermont for cherries! Of course there are stops to places like South Dakota and Alaska along the way!
BIBLE:
To make a nice pie crust, you need a little salt! Salt just adds that little bit of flavor. An entire bible lesson could be made on that and just these two bible verses!
“Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? Luke 14:34
Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. Colossians 4:6
ENGLISH:
There is a lot of good vocabulary in this book!
Ingredients: – We had all of the ingredients for making the recipe for the pie (included with the book!) on the table so that we could point to them as we talked about ingredients.
Locate: We found every place mentioned in the book on a huge map of the United States.
Elegant: Graceful and stylish!
Coax: To cajole or to encourage.
Native: Naturally occurring
Plantation: A huge southern home found in the South of American in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Gumbo: A kind of stew.
MATH:
Nothing is more fun in a math class than measuring out ingredients! There’s plenty to measure here including flour, butter, shortening and salt. We even talked about the amount of contents in the canned pie filling! If I were doing this at home, I would have used the recipe for the pie filling with fresh or frozen cherries, but in a co-op setting, the canned filling was easier.
NUTRITION:
We’ve had a theme this semester of nutrition. Cherry pie is a carbohydrate. It is full of sugar which is good for energy. But too many carbs do not allow the body to metabolize fat stores and can lead to weight gain. Too many sweets are also not good for your teeth. But once in a while, a nice pie in moderation can be part of a healthy diet.
It would be interesting to note to the children later when they study the book Farmer Boy, that the Wilder family regularly ate cakes and pies, but they were also doing a tremendous amount of physical activity, including the women who were making meals and keeping house without any of our modern conveniences.
GEOGRAPHY:
This is an awesome book for teaching little kids a little bit about America. I had a big United States Map on the floor so the kids could gather around it, and we touched each place as the book talked about it. Highlights for my class (What I really wanted them to remember) was the Ohio River flowing into the great Mississippi and then flowing all of the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. We pretended to be at 4 corners in New Mexico so that the kids could pretend to be standing in four states at one time! For the first time this season, we learned where Hawaii and Alaska are. We traveled down the east coast from Maine all the way down to Texas. Lastly we spent some focus on South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore.
SOCIAL STUDIES:
We spent a great deal of time on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. In 1923, South Dakota was trying to find a way to promote tourism to the area.
Mt. Rushmore got it’s name from David Nevin Swanzey, the husband of Carrie Ingalls of the Little House Books fame. David saw the piece of mountain and named it Mt. Rushmore after his friend, Charles Rushmore .
Originally they were going to carve Western heroes into the mountain, but changed that to four presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln.
President Calvin Coolidge was there for the beginning of the project in 1927. It was completed in 1941 and dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, cousin of Theodore.
The sculptor was Gutzon Borglum. Originally the presidents were to be portrayed to the waist, but that idea was abandoned when they ran out of money for the project. There were no fatalities in completing the project.
These mountains are part of the Black Hills and this part was called the six grandfathers by the Native Americans.
I used this packet from Teachers Paying Teachers for the kids to color Mt. Rushmore and make their own portrayal of that area with trees and landscaping.
SCIENCE:
You need granite to make a pastry slab! Granite is a
ART:
Originally, I wanted each kid to be able to make their own little cherry pie. However, I had kids with gluten allergies, and one who hated fruit. It seemed just easier to make the one big pie so that they could see it being done. Then instead, we made these little fruit pies that aren’t really edible at all, but sure make cute little magnets for the kitchen.
I took small pie tins and hot glued a magnet to the bottom. Elmer’s won’t work with this. It won’t hold. It had to be hot glue and I did this part before we got to class.
I glued a little bit of foam on top of the magnet. That gives the illusion of a fuller pie.
I cut a circle out of light brown felt and another circle out of red construction paper. In class, the kids can do that if the circles are drawn out for them on the felt and the paper.
I put the felt on top of the pie tin, right on top of the magnet and stuffing. I tucked it all in and secured it with hot glue. Kids can help tuck, but a grown up needs to secure with the hot glue.
I found it was faster if the kids glued their fake cherries to the construction paper, while the adult was gluing the felt down. When all of the berries are attached, you can put the paper with berries into the little pie.
Lastly, the kids cut strips of felt and weaved them as the pie top. We did some weaving in the first semester, so this was not totally new for them, although they needed to be reminded. At every junction, we used Elmer’s glue to secure the felt pieces together.
Then we trimmed them back a bit so that each piece could be tucked inside the pie tin, underneath the other felt acting as a pie crust. Then apply glue or ot glue generously to keep the whole thing togther.
This was our final result!