Warm as Wool

The story of the week: Warm as Wool by Scott Russel Sanders. This is a story about hard work, perseverance and ultimately, success. The book is about the Ward family's struggle for a life on the western frontier. The family perseveres through their first winter. Then Betsy Ward uses money saved from back east to purchase sheep. The book relates her success (not without failure) with raising the sheep and clothing her children in wool, hand-spun and hand-woven. The picture of the family, singing and dancing happily concludes the story perfectly.
We enjoyed reading this story and learning about sheep. The children were excited that the sheep in Helen Cogancherry's illustrations had horns. This led to a little research into breeds of sheep. We learned that the sheep pictured in this book were likely Merino or Dorset that have horns. We also read the story Smudge, the little lost lamb by James Herriot about a Swaledale sheep. This breed of sheep also has horns.
We made some sheep crafts practicing cutting paper and glue-ing.

And we had fun playing westward expansion using Anastasia's toddler bed as our covered wagon. Even Gwendolyn got into the action and enjoyed cuddling with our little stuffed sheep. So cute.

We enjoyed counting, adding and subtracting with play-doh sheep, cotton balls, and blocks. Using the scenarios from the book and making up some of our own.