The Red Carpet

Another Before Five in a Row book I did with the younger boys was The Red Carpet by Pex Parkin. The manual has good ideas for a younger crowd (geared for ages 2-4) but I still wanted to use it and beefed it up just a little.

We marked it on our map, using New York as our 'home' for the Hotel Bellevue. Did you know there really is a city called Kobe? I didn't, but we found out it is in Japan. We also put story discs on Paris and London to show where people were traveling from to stay at the Hotel Bellevue.

Ideas I copied were the vocabulary words and the coins for the ferry. An original idea I had was to make a little homophone book that included words like fairy/ferry, wing (of a bird)/wing (of a building), in/Inn and (one I forgot to include) hare/hair.
We talked about Newton's first law of Motion which states: An object will remain at rest, or continue to move at a constant velocity, unless an external net force acts upon it. Then we watched a soccer ball gain momentum as we rolled it down the hill.

We also compared parts of the story that were similar to those in Lentil by Robert McCloskey. We talked about how in both stories people were made to feel special. Seth (6) also pointed out how the mayor in Lentil was worried when the band could not play, and how the doorman was worried when the carpet ran away.

Special thanks to Molly at Homeschool with Index Cards for helping me get handwriting lines on an index card to make the vocabulary template.