Homeschool with Five in a Row: Truman's Aunt Farm

"Truman's Aunt Farm" by J. Rattigan cleverly played off the homonyms ant/ aunt. The story begins with Truman sending in a card to receive an ant farm. To his surprise he does not receive an ant farm, he receives a line of Aunts! Left with the unexpected, Truman took charge and created a farm that trained Aunts that "were strong and happy... charming and clever... slept, played, sang, danced, and talked just enough."

Homeschooling with Five in a Row

Social Studies:

Placed our story disk where some of our Aunts live. While talking about the location and the lakes that surround the state, he noticed that the two peninsula's "almost touch," which led us searching online for pictures and information about the Mackinaw Bridge; he was pretty fascinated!

Language Arts:

Letter-writing: We read a very short and simple book about "How to Write a Letter" and then he wrote a letter (on ant stationary!) to his Aunts telling them why they are special to him. I'm sure they'll wonder why we chose such a theme ; ) He did very good with the fill-in-the-blank style letter-- not too much to overwhelm him; although, he did have to write THREE letters!

Homonyms: I kept this very introductory and basic-- it's a tricky topic to teach when the student isn't reading! I just explained that homonyms were words that sounded the same, but meant different things. To introduce the topic, we read "Little Brown Hen's Shower"---such a CUTE and funny book! I made homonym matches using clipart online; for the first activity I split the matches between us and had my son pick up a card and tell me what it was... my response was, "Wait! I have_____". He and I had fun with that! Afterwards, we played memory!

(made a good vocabulary lesson, too!)

Math:

Making .45cents: Since Truman and his Aunt Fran communicated by writing letters, we use his Melissa and Doug Money Set (this set certainly has come in handy!!) to make .45cents. We first counted 45 pennies, then used combinations of other coins to make .45cents.

Counting by5's/ Tally Marks: We have went over both these concepts a number of times, so this was a bit of a review and a note for me the he can do both tasks. Using clipart I found online, we counted the ants (which were grouped in 5's), wrote the number, and then expressed the number using tally marks.