Five in a Row book 4

The book this week was Lentil by Robert McCloskey. It's about a boy who saves the day in his little 1940s town by playing his harmonica at a crucial time. It's a cute story - the girls really liked it.

Honestly, the Five in a Row structure is not really appealing to me. It annoys me to read the same book over and over and over, even when you're supposed to do a different activity with it every day. My girls go back and forth with their boredom level with the repetition as well - Sunny brings me the FIAR book every day but half the time doesn't pay attention and looks through other books while I'm reading it out loud.

The FIAR activity book itself does not seem to be working for us, or at least for me. Most of the activities listed are either entirely beyond the grasp of my kiddos (analyzing art mediums in the illustrations - really? Even as an adult, I need quite a bit more guidance on art analysis than 2 or 3 sentences) or are not really "activities" to do at all - they're vague discussion points. Flipping through the Lentil story, I came up with a number of ideas for activities (which I promptly proceeded to not do - it was a tired week for pregnant Mom) that would have been much more interesting for us than the suggestions in the activity book.

The activity book was extremely over-priced. I couldn't find it used so I bought it new online - $35 plus another $5 for shipping. It looks like it was printed off someone's computer and bound with the cheap plastic spiral at Kinko's. Not worth 40 bucks by a long shot.

And then there's the fact that our public library doesn't even have most of the books on the reading list, even when they're listed in the online card catalog as being available. So that also puts a substantial damper on things. Four weeks, and I've just about maxed out the library's offerings for this activity book. I may give it another week or 2 of finding books and coming up with activities on my own, but it looks like the Five in a Row series will quickly drop off the list in favor of other reading.