FIAR: Visit to Italy through Papa Piccolo

Ah, Italy. Bellissimo Italiano.

With The Girl's love of language and my love of travel, we could have kept going forever with this study on Italy. And The Boy was along for the ride. (Well, mostly the catnip tea, which he can't get enough of.)

As always, we started off with the Homeschool Share lapbook; here is the link to the one on Italy.

I love the free country landmark sheets from Education.com, because they show the flag, and important landmarks, with a few other activities. Here's the link for the one on Italy. 

COLOR THEORY
The color wheel is fundamental to good art, and so we did a few experiments with colored water, a handout protected within a ziplock bag, and eye droppers. Here is the link to the free printable we used. The artwork we made on a paper towel was hung up and displayed for several months. It was so cool!

Here's the color wheel activity page that served as our guide (and reminder).  Here's another color wheel handout we used.

We meant to paint like Michelangelo by taping paper to the bottom of a table, but never did because then I saw the idea of re-creating a taller structure so folks could stand and paint the bottom of a surface (like this), and thought that would be so much better. Better, but not something I figured out how to do. Another time.

ARTISTS: MICHELANGELO AND DAVINCI
There is so much about the Renaissance and artwork that we could have talked about, but this time around I thought we would just get to know a few of the artists. I started off with focusing on Michelangelo, but then tales of Leonardo da Vinci slipped in.

FIAR: Meow, meowing through Papa Piccolo

When you already love cats, rowing through a lovely story book on cats is the most perfect thing you could do.

We greatly enjoyed the varied cat activities and books we looked through while studying "Papa Piccolo" by Carol Talley, and tarried with this book far too long!

One of the Logic of English - Foundations readers just happened to focus on cats and dogs. Yay!

First off, we mined Homeschool Share for its Cat Lapbook, and did many of the activities in there. There were cat breed cards, cat classification information, and more.

We played Kittens in the Gondola and worked on math skills. Come on, the gondolas and kittens are just too cute, aren't they?

CATNIP TEA AND TOYS
We enjoy learning about herbs in general, and so we took the time to focus in on Catnip. After quick trip to our local herbal pharmacy, The Medicine Tree, in south Minneapolis, we had a bag of dried catnip. We loved drinking the tea ourselves. It makes a nice, mellow tea that actually soothes humans while it revs up cats.

And then we made catnip toys for our two kitties, using felt and yarn. We followed this easy pattern: http://www.woojr.com/gifts-for-pets-catnip-mouse-toy-pattern/

Drawing is one of The Girl's favorite activities, and she enjoyed following this tutorial on how to draw a cat.

The Girl loves word searches, but most are too hard for her. This Kitty Word search was perfect.

We branched out from just cats, and investigated 5 Animals You Didn't Know Were Nocturnal (a number of which are big cats). I printed the article out so we could fashion our own little book from the information and photos.

We also learned a bit about our own eyes and conducted a peripheral vision experiment. We marked off on the sidewalk when we could see something appear on the side in our peripheral vision. This handout listing the major parts of the eye was useful, as was this one titled What is Your Eye? And we read over a graphic that showed the eyes and ears of a cat, and compared them to ours.

We had tons of fun with the Who Am I game on the Night Animal Sounds interactive web site, listing to various voices and guessing about what animal the sounds belonged to.

We meant to make Cat Masks or Venetian Masks, but never got to them. It was just too easy to do a million things with this book, and we spent 2 months on it before I finally decided it was time to move on. Else we were going to spend all year on this one book!

WE READ
Cats (Pets plus) by Head, Honor
Cat (Eyewitness (Dorling Kindersley Limited)) by Clutton-Brock, Juliet
Why do Cats Meow?
Cats by DK Publishing
The dog who had kittens by Robertus, Polly M.
Five little kittens by Jewell, Nancy
Wish Come True Cat by Ragnhild Scamell
If You Give A Cat A Cupcake by Laura Numeroff
Moses the Kitten by James Herriot
Big Cats: Hunters of the night by Elaine Landeau
Raccoons: Scavengers of the night by Elaine Landeau
Owls: Hunters of the night by Elaine Landeau
Night animals by Cohen, Daniel
Night animals by Selsam, Millicent E.
Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore
Six Dinner Sid: A Highland Adventure by Inga Moore
Socks by Cleary, Beverly
Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag

WE WATCHED
Of course, we watched the Dreamworks version of "Puss in Boots"!