The Rag Coat (part 1)

The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills is the book for this week. It is a story about a little girl who lives in the mountains and wants to go to school but doesn't own a coat. Her family is poor and her father just died so there is little money to go around. Her mother and the other quilting mothers put together their scraps of fabric and make Minna a coat. She loves this coat because it is full of stories of the people around her - each piece of fabric has a story attached. But when she wears it to school, the kids make fun of her. But she is determined to tell her story and the story of the coat.

One interesting item of this book, when I was reading it to J, she became very sad because of the death of Minna's father as well as the sadness of Minna when she was being teased. We talked about those feelings, J was alittle upset. I can't say that this book is her favorite but we are continuing with it anyway. It has alot of items in the pictures that show what life was like without electricity and cars. We also worked with shape recognition because of the quilts mentioned in the book. I had found a geoboard here with some rubber bands and J created different shapes with the rubberbands.

We created a quilt block made from some fabric scraps like Minna's coat. Each piece of fabric had a story behind it. One was a piece of her cape, another part of her quilt, one from Kaleb's hat, etc...

J glued the pieces on card stock with white glue mixed with water. Here is our final quilt block...

For our Social Studies, we read about the Liberty Bell and created our own Liberty Bell with a cup and some tissue paper.

She cut the tissue paper into pieces and glued them onto the cup. We added a bell and, once it dries, J insists we add a crack.



Okay, so it is not bronze like the original. Of course, J wanted a multicolored bell just like coat in The Rag Coat book!