THE STORY OF PING!

Have you ever read the story of Ping, a duck who lives on the Yangtze River in China? Well, we LOVE Ping and have read it more times than I can cout! My friend gave us a book that gives you different activities to do with children's books that you read, so we tried some......it was a blast for the kids and I! And I must say that I now know more about the Yangtze River than I ever could have imagined! We learned that it' one of the longest rivers in the world, we studied the primary animals living in it and those that are extinct and endangered (all thanks to You Tube.....I'm such a tangential learner.....once I click on one video I take every rabbit-trail that comes up next!).

One of our lessons was about buoyancy, so we did an experiment: we grabbed household objects and put them in water to see which were buoyant and which sank! Yes, you'll see, we got a little carried away and our poor little pot couldn't quite hold all of our objects.....but the kids were so excited to try new things that they ran all over the house looking for anything waterproof to plop in the pot!

Alethia added every piece of silverware that we own!

I told you, it got a little crowded in there!

And here, below, is our Yangtze River! Ping has many relatives and so we counted paperclips to use for his family members......and then Caleb dumped all our paperclips "into" our river to have more fun playing! It was really cute and they actually played with their paperclip duck family for over 30 minutes! Who needs toys??!!??

Oh yeah, I forgot about the rubberbands.....I think they were the boats (there's a lot of boat traffic on the Yangtze which is one of the reasons the Yangtze Dolphin is extinct and the Chinese Sturgeon and Chinese Alligator are endangered....just a little tid bit that we learned!! I know, I know you're impressed, huh??!! You can learn a lot on YouTube!).