The Tale of Peter Rabbit {FI♥AR}


We rowed The Tale of Peter Rabbit as a part of our gardening unit this Spring. Last year, when we rowed The Carrot Seed, we read the book, planted the seeds and waited (and waited!) for the carrots to come up before we rowed the book. This year, we rowed Peter Rabbit during the preparation and planting of our garden and I am so glad we did. I could have rowed this for a few more weeks (we are still planting), but I decided it was time to move on and we will come back to the garden this Summer for another row. 

Our focus for The Tale of Peter Rabbit included England, Beatrix Potter, and gardening and The World of Peter Rabbit proved to be a fun and educational site to go along with our row.

We also did activities from Homeschool Creation's Garden Preschool Pack:

In this first game, we played "Hide the Trowel" under the cabbages. Mali and Elli pointed out right away that we should have had a rabbit to hide in the cabbages just like in the story. . . so I told them that we could pretend that Mr. McGregor lost his trowel when he got up to chase Peter (he was working in the cabbages after all). 


After that, I challenged Eliana to put the cabbages in numerical order. . .


It turned into a great lesson on the 100's chart (first two rows of it, anyways) and she matched up the numbers in the 2nd row by matching the number to the first row.


Then we played Memory Match with garden vocabulary words.


And Malachi matched veggie name cards to veggie picture cards.


(We used wet erase markers to reuse these pages.)

Simple Days Unit Study ~ This study includes the story in a PDF with 3 worksheets at the end (T/F, sequencing events, and a notebooking page).





(You could also print the story to make story strips to put the story in order.)

Copywork and Illustration:








From the manual, we covered setting rules, setting (English countryside), onomatopoeia, noticing details, what a naturalist is, what a fortnight it, crisis thinking, and more.

Gardening {Science}

I made a virtual garden online with this handy Kitchen Garden Planner {thanks Jolanthe!} to help me remember what I planted and where and I had each child make their own garden.


Malachi learned the parts of a plant and their funciton (leaves make food using the sun, drinks water from its roots and the stem transports the water). We also did the classic celery and red food coloring experiment from our Daily Science.



I've been sharing our gardening adventure as we go. We even found a little frog friend in our backyard.

Mr. Jeremy Fisher?

We have radishes!

Ready for the picking. 
We made a "Peter Rabbit" garden salad for our FIAR recipe. =)

We also listened to Maestro Classics ~ The Tortoise and the Hare. This was just as much fun to listen to the second time! We compared and contrasted the rabbit and the hare and enjoyed the French music. {That was the extent of "rabbits" for this lesson}. We listened to "The Pretzel Vendor of Paris" when we rowed Madeline and loved the French flair. We are rowing The Glorious Flight right now (set in Cambrai, France ~ Louis Bleirot flies over the English Channel), and I'm thinking we should have rowed Peter Rabbit after we flew over the English Channel, but I think it worked out well. When we started our row last week, the kids were excited to recognize the country of France. =)

The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a selection from Five in a RowVolume 2.

Delightful Links:

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