Hanna's Cold Winter {FI♥AR}

I rowed Hanna's Cold Winter with Eliana, but I didn't plan - just opened the manual and started rowing. We had a great week, but the most exciting part was ordering Hungarian Sweet Smoked Paprika from Amazon and making Chicken Paprikash!


Hanna's Cold Winter is based on a true story of a hippo named Hanna and the other hippos that thrived in the warm springs of Budapest, Hungary. One winter, however, it was so cold that the river between the twin towns of Buda and Pest froze. There was a shortage of food coming into the town because of a war going on, and people and animals were starving. This heartwarming story is about how the townspeople saved their beloved hippos by gathering their straw mats and slippers to feed the hungry hippos.

For Social Studies, we found Budapest on Google earth and sang the Eastern Europe song from Geography Songs to learn the countries surrounding Hungary. Geography Songs is now a free download for Amazon Prime members.

Eliana did some of the Hanna's Cold Winter lapbook at Homeschool Share - she colored the flag of Hungary, matched up images of Budapest to their term (she learned what a cog train is, what a forint is and more), did the geography of Hungary mini book, learned what time it is in Hungary compared to where she lives, and traced the path of the Danube River.

The father in the story works a 6 day work week, and so do we, except we take the 7th day of the week off instead of the 1st day - we talked about that and what others do.

I was determined to be consistent with our row, so I ended up taking our school to the Y one day while Bo had Itty Bitty Basketball, and we read the story and covered first-person point of view and later did the detective exercise from the manual at home for Language Arts.

For Art, we did the lesson from the manual on focal point and balance  - all good discussion.

Science was on peppers - Paprika. We learned how paprika is prepared and enjoyed making the recipe from the manual - Chicken Paprikash served over dumplings (I tweaked the recipe a little).

We talked about the hot springs in Wyoming for the Geology lesson.

We watched several videos on Hippos to go along with the Zoology lesson in the manual.

Another day we made an easy Hungarian apple strudel (using puff pastry sheets and homemade apple filling).

Math tied into her Math Lessons for Living Education - liquid measurements.

It would have been fun to make straw mats! But our straw is used to keep the chickens comfy and warm this time of year.  :)

A simple row, but we did at least one or two lessons from each section.

Hanna's Cold Winter is a Five in a Row selection from Volume 4.


When I am not rowing with Eliana, I am working through Evan Moor's Beginning Geography and 6-Traits Writing. And Luke has been reading The Knights of Arrethtrae series by Chuck Black. They just started the 5th book in the series. He reads to them every night that he is home to tuck them in bed and on weekends. Soon he will be working late nights for soccer and it will be my turn to read and tuck them in. (I'm missing my read-aloud time with them, but it has freed me up to get some work done and I love that they have this time with their dad.)

4 comments

  1. Sounds like you had a great week enjoying a good story together!

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  2. Question about Math Lessons for a Living Education. Have you used this for longer than a year and do you plan to continue using it? I am looking for my almost 8 year old daughter. Thanks for any info you can give me. Love to read your posts! We have followed a lot of your FIAR over the years. :)

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  3. Christine, this is our 2nd year with Math Lessons for a Living Education. It has been perfect for my daughter because it is gentle but thoroughly explains concepts and offers plenty of review in a fun hands on way and through a story. I just ordered Book 3 since she is almost done with Book 2 and she likes it. (Math is one of her favorite subjects now!)

    Math comes a little easier to Malachi and he is using Teaching Textbooks now. I like it because it gives a teaching (lecture), has him do practice problems, then exercises and even quizzes. And it grades it all. It does much of the work for me and he likes it. (I may add Life of Fred back in when we get to Fractions since I really love the upper level Fred books, but will continue with TT). I considered switching Eliana to TT since it starts at grade 3, but we want to get in at least one more MLLE book before I do.

    Thanks for following along over the years! It's such a blessing to me to know that.

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  4. This is a "row" on our wish list. I am glad to see you mention it as simple :) I'm working with scarce supplies and creative juices with this health battle and simply winging each week.

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