A Pair of Red Clogs

Last week we worked on A Pair of Red Clogs, by Masako Matsuno. This book was about a little Japanese girl whose mother bought her a new pair of red clogs. In playing a weather telling game, which involves flipping the sandal off her foot to see which way it lands, she cracks her new clog. She decides to make it as dirty and scruffy as she can in the hopes that she can get her mother to buy her a new pair. But, her conscience soon pricks and she ends up washing the sandals (at her mother's kind prodding) and the clogs are good as new-almost. Her mother never chastises, but mentions at dinner that perhaps they'd best get her a new pair and maybe this time she should refrain from playing the weather telling game on the stony road. How did she know without being told? Amazing!

So, we learned about where Japan is located, what an island is, wrote a few Haiku poems, and talked about weather and kept track of it for the week-including measuring the rainfall in our rain gauge.