Homeschooling with Five in a Row: Little Nino's Pizzeria

"I [just] wanna make pizza!" Little Nino's father exclaims after he realizes that "bigger is not always better."

The book, "Little Nino's Pizzeria" is written using simple, short text but the colorful pictures and pizza theme made the book very enjoyable for us to read all week. One of my favorite things about using Five In a Row is that it is very adaptable to all different ages.

The manual gives points of discussion, but from there so many other avenues of learning open up for you to dig deeper. For the littles, all subjects could have been related to "pizza" and for the older students, you could have talked more about money, budgeting, owning a business, etc.

Little Nino's Pizzeria Go Along Activities

We touched on many manual lessons such as:

having a servants heart
coin sort
gouache medium
personification
food groups
.. and more!

Homeschooling with Five in a Row

I took more pictures this week! Here is more of what we did....

Building off of Play Create Explore's Felt Pizza Busy Bag, T practiced fractions using our Melissa & Doug Pizza Party Set. I made a menu for T and on each 'page' I included a picture of the customers and wrote the fraction of how many pieces of pizza would have a certain ingredient.

So here is a picture of what this family ordered-- this activity was fun but a bit tricky for T to understand. I, too, found myself getting all jumbled up. But here we have 3 of 6 pieces of pizza with pepperoni, 2 of 6 pieces contain mushrooms, and 4 of 6 pieces have peppers. We did this activity correctly, right? Fractions are not my thing!

Little Nino's Pizzeria Go Along Activity

For more fraction practice, I found this fun little game from a row of Little Nino's over at Adventures in Unsell Land.

The pictures in the book were very similar to the works of French artist, Henri Matisse so T made his own colorful collages.

I pulled out our Homonym cards we used for Truman's Aunt Farm and we played memory and did this little fill in the blank activity

Covering our map of Italy with Play dough-- we also did the flag; pardon the orange! We do know that the flag is green, white, and RED but we had no red play dough!

Did you know that there is no longer a food pyramid?! I didn't! Learning about food groups is now taught with this "My Plate" concept. Each meal should contain something from each of these five food groups. Lately I have been all about creating "lift the flap" type activities and here again, we did it to create "T's Plate." I had T color several pieces of food and then we cut them out and glued them under the right category.

I've already taken the book back to the library, so I am not sure what it's called, but it was full of poems about pizza! T did copy work involving a poem titled, "Everything."

A pizza with everything on it?

I want it, I want it, I want it.

But I wonder does everything mean the same thing

to everyone else as me?

As you can see, T's "everything" pizza would be covered with chocolate and candy! And afterwards, T created his own "everything" pizza using salt dough recipe, left over Halloween candy, and paint! For fun, we turned it into a Christmas ornament that he can hang up on his tree.