A Leaping Off Place

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Today, I went into our afternoon unit study (KONOS) time honestly not having any idea which activity we were going to do. I finally chose an activity in which the kids were supposed to write a story called "Little Mouse on the Prairie" from the viewpoint of a mouse, traveling with a frontier family. My reluctant writers rebelled and we had a little negotiating session. My older son didn't mind writing it, in the form of a diary, but didn't want it to be a mouse, and made it a frontier boy's diary. It turned out quite well. The other two started out making a notebook page about a little mouse on the praire, then it grew to 2 mice, then 2 mice and a paper doll (from this site) and now there are grandparent and parent mice and they are all paper dolls. They also made a cabin for the mice which took up 2 regular pages and had the outside of the building drawn on 1 side and the inside of the building, including furniture, buckets of maple syrup and huge stores of cheese for the winter, drawn on the other side of the paper. So today, we took the suggested activity and used it as a leaping off place. It was fun.