Top 10 Tuesday - Five in a Row Books

It is Top 10 Tuesday again. Here are 10 of our favorite Five in a Row books. These are the books my children really got excited about. Not every book as been as popular as others. These ones have really stuck with my children. So in no particular order......

1. The Story of Ping by Marjorie Flack
We loved learning about China. Sophie now points out the Yangze river whenever we see a map of China. We also had a big Chinese food dinner and ate with chopsticks. The paper lanterns we made hung in my daughters room for ages.

2. Wee Gillis by Munro Leaf
My husband loved this book. He loves bagpipes and Scottland. We timed this book around the Scottish Festival that is held in our town each ear so we went and saw some highland dancing and listened to bagpipers.



3. Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
One of our favorite things we did was build the Eiffel tower out of legos. My kids now recognise the tower anytime they see it. They also loved it when we took pictures of them doing all the things we do to keep ourselves healthy. I took pictures of them washing their hands, eating healthy food, drinking water, pretending to be asleep in their beds. We then printed the pictures and made a little book talking about all the things in the pictures. What kid doesn't love to pose for pictures and see themselved in pictures.



4. Follow the Drinking Gourd by Jeanette Winter
I was surprised this was so popular. My kids had me read this over and over. For some reason they were facinated by the slave running away to freedom. They also really loved us learning about the big dipper. We made a little star projector out of a tin can and a flashlight. We projected differet constelations on the ceiling in a dark room. They loved this. My daughter got all excited when we she was able to point out the real big dipper in the sky one night when we visited Grandma's house

5. Duchess Bakes a Cake by Virgina Kahl
This is one of my favorities to read. I love books that are writen in rhyme. We of course baked a cake the week we rowed this book. We learned all about castles and kings and queens and knights. We picked up the Magic tree house book "Knight at dawn as a go along. This was our first Magic Tree house book. We now get a few new ones everytime we go to the library.



6. Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton
We read this one all the time I can almost do it from memory now. My boys love books about cars and trucks and the like. Ian particularly loves this book. This book takes place in a made up town so for geography we studied about Utah. Utah claims to have "the best snow on Earth". So we learned about Snow and Utah. One of the things I remember most about this book was the day we studied signs and then went on a drive and pointed out all the road signs as we drove down the road. We also read a book called I read signs by Tana Hoban which is actually just pictures of signs that we see around us. After reading this book my daughter pointed out every Open or Closed sign we saw on any stores we visited and every Pull or Push sign as well.

7. Giraffe that walked to Paris by Nancy Milton
We had already studied paris and france so we focused our study on Egypt and Giraffes. Sophie loved studing about the sphinx and pyramids. We also rolled out a long paper and measured 16 feet which is how tall the giraffe was. We drew a giraffe on our paper and then hung it on the wall and onto the ceiling.


8. Another Celebrated Dancing Bear by Glady's Scheffrin-Falk
This was a really interest shifting week for my daughter. We studied about Russia and I decided to show the kids the part of the movie Fantasia where the Nutcraker suite is played. She loved it so much she asked to see the whole movie the next time she got to pick. She watched that and asked for more classical music. She is still thrilled to listen to Beethoven, Mozart, Hayden, Debussey, and pretty much anything that I play for her. She has been facinated with music ever since. She has even started some very basic piano lessons and music theory.

9. Papa Piccolo by Carol Talley
I have actually visited Venice so I was able to show my photos of being there to my kids. They loved this. While in Venice my sister and I painted masks. So we made cat masks and decorated them with glitter and feathers and pompoms. They loved this!


10. Katy no Pocket
This is a Before FIAR book but we rowed it one week so we could study about Australia and all the Australian animals. We worked on Animal classification this week. Learned all about marsupials. We read this book all the time. The boys particularly like it. Maybe because it is illustrated by the same person that does Curious George, another favorite of theirs.

I just took a look at a list of all the books for Five in A Row and as I look at the list there I see many other books we have rowed that we have loved as well. Owl Moon, Night of the MoonJellies, How to bake and apple pie and see the world, Lentil, Make way for ducklings, the Clown of God, Very Last First Time, They Were Strong and Good, Cranberry Thanksgiving,The Rag Coat, The Glorious Flight...etc... we really haven't had one that we didn't enjoy. And we have taken something from each of them. Maybe this wasn't such a great topic for a top 10. Maybe I should have just said these were the 10 that popped into my mind first.

We haven't rowed all the books yet so we still have a lot of learning ahead of us. Hip Hip Hooray for Five in a Row!