Quilting and Coal

Quilting and coal don't seem like they'd go together, but they do when reading The Rag Coat. 

It's a story about a girl named Minna, she lives somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains and her father dies. She needs a coat so she can go to school during the winter months. Her mom quilts with some other ladies and they use their scraps to piece her a colorful coat full of stories from their lives. 

There were so many great things we did with this. We:

Made "coal" cookies. After talking about how coal was formed we layered many things to make our cookies (the boys were identifying things as we went such as dirt, dead animals, dinosaurs, etc). It was fun. 

We made coal together out of flour, salt and water. I painted them black and they went mining under the table with helmets, flashlights, coal buckets and all. Then they took turns hiding them. They made sure to go down the "elevator" before entering the mine. They picked that up from a few of the educational short movies we watched. 

We discovered where the Appalachian mountains are located. 

We also painted Halloween pictures and went to the farmstead with Maryn and Jonas. We had a lot of fun with them and the boys even got to shoot pumpkins at an old van. Eloise's favorite thing was the tunnel slide. It was an eventful week.