The Pumpkin Runner

For the past few weeks the kids have been studying The Pumpkin Runner by Marsha Arnold. Inspired by a real man named Cliff Young, this story is a tall tale that tells about a race from Melbourne to Sydney, Australia.

The kids had fun discovering some things about Australia while hearing about tall tales and fables and vocabulary words like lanky. E9 and R7 did some extensive work on map skills- cardinal directions using a compass rose, measuring distances on a map using a ruler and the scale, and even determining locations based on longitude and latitude.

There's a lot to this book and next time we hit it, we can add newscasting and human body to the lesson list. For now we'll be moving on to some Thanksgiving activities.

R7 labels her map and identifies where AU is on a world map.

I-5's map of Australia

E9 rowed this book with us because it's a volume 4 book for older kids too. Here he practices some cursive writing skills and pumpkin drawing using Draw Write Now. We also had a fun lesson on how Australians use some different words than we do. I think I'll be telling my kids not to grizzle so much from now on! Grizzle- what a great word for complain!I-5's Australia notebook page marking the flag, its animals , and opposite seasons! That's yellow dog from the book there too.

I-5's handwriting page- this was a tracer and a pumpkin vine drawing. You can't contain the creativity so enjoy the funky vine.

R7's page on AU. In the flap book on the globe she tells very succinctly why AU is called the "land down under". Well because it is below the equator of course Mommy!

This picture shows her AU word page.

E9's flag page. He's also good at answering the bonus questions. All of these maps and exercises come from Evan Moor's Teacher Filebox.

Working on the long list of 18 vocabulary words- they got to match the definitions to the words

Measuring distances and reading pictographs on population- R7 begged to try and did a fantastic job!