Call it Courage 'Clothing' Project

We homeschool three days a week. One day per week is coop and one day is public school. Even though it's only three days a week, by afternoon I am DONE. Sometime between 2:00-3:00 it's required the kids be outside. We have a lovely, big, fully fenced yard so it gives me a break and they get some unstructured time.

This week, older toad decided to spend some of that time making fabric. He found one of the ginger plants in the backyard had very soft leaves on the bottom. He came to me and asked if he could turn them in to fabric. While it did involve my effort to get out the thread and thread his needles for him, I appreciated his self-directed project so I helped him out. The picture below is what he did. He thought it was neat. We've talked about fibers and how fabric is made (wool and cotton) and he realizes this isn't anything close to the real thing, but he just enjoyed the process. I love these projects that they come up with entirely on their own and try to work them in to 'school' to give more validation to what they've done.

We've (he reads aloud one page, I read aloud one page alternating) been reading Call it Courage intermittently so I used his fabric and the book as a writing prompt for a creative writing activity. We don't do enough creative writing, in my mind anyway, which I talked about in a post here. We're trying to do one story that Toad writes, both creatively and penmanship, per month. So this ended up being perfect. Below is what he wrote. I've edited for capital and lower case letters in the correct places in the transcription. I orally helped him with his spelling so that was all correct and the grammar is all his.  He illustrated the first page with Mafatu and Uri in the boat.

Mafatu lost his clothes in the ocean. Then he saw land. The canoe drifted towards the land. The canoe shot up in the air and fell on a coral reef. He swam to land. He saw Uri drinking water from a brook. Mafatu found some plants with soft leaves. He made clothes with the leaves he found. The end.

Hardly Shakespeare I know, but I was thrilled he could recall what we read in his own words so well, add a little of his own writing that followed the prompt so well, and actually write it all himself legibly. It's huge progress for us.

I do have a pareu project planned anyway, which we'll do next week so this was just gravy.

I've included a list of some of the Call it Courage resources I found below:

Biography of Armstrong Sperry maintained by his granddaughter

Geography through literature worksheets based on Call it Courage

Taking Grades albatross graphic organizer

Jumping Brain worksheets

What win/win projects have you done lately?

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JDaniels4's Mom
Learning ALL the time