Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Rather than have I-6 row the chapter books like Helen Keller with the older two kids like I had orginally planned, I decided to row some books with him that we'd done when R8 was in kindergarten and he was just 3yo. Yes! We've been doing FIAR that long! There are a lot of fun titles from that time including many from the first volume of FIAR (my personal favorite).

Here we have a study of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. For being a girl she sure had the love of large machinery down pat complete with heroes and action- perfect for little boys!!

The cover of his Mike Mulligan lapbook. He really likes the construction vehicle stickers I found at the grocery store.

I-6 got to explore lots of different steam powered machines from long ago. I found these pictures on the internet and we put them in a pocket in the lapbook. Plus, since Mary Anne is a steam shovel, he did a construction vehicle book and personified them all! He really enjoyed naming each one and adding a face. Thanks to Homeschool Share for some of these printables.

Vocabulary included canals and cellar. We talked about being good stewards and we had an art lesson on drawing trees.

As we finish out our time with Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne, we will be doing:

• an art lesson on showing movement of an object
• some road building engineering (too rainy and cold for the sandbox so I'll have to think on this one)
• some simple geometry so we know it means when Mike and Mary Anne dug four corners, neat and square
• an experiment with steam demonstrating steam power
• some counting with grouping using Ms. Burton's illustrations