All the Places to Love

Author: Patricia MacLachlan
Illustrator: Mike Wimmer
ISBN: 0-06-021098-2
Summary: A beautiful look at rural life with a family who loves the place they live, each one loving a different place on or near their farm the most. Told in the voice of a baby who is born at the very beginning of the book, the narrative language is calming and brings feelings of true peace and joy. The illustrations are breathtaking. One summary says, “Patricia MacLachlan and Mike Wimmer have crafted a moving homage to the American farm, re-creating all the glory and sweet simplicity of one family’s connection to the land.”

Tracy's Note: There are wonderful opportunities in this study for rabbit trails. You can study a topic as in depth or as simply as you choose for your family. I’m offering many ideas for discussion/activities/research and study as I have been able to. You do NOT need to do everything in this study. What you choose to do or not do is completely up to you, as only you know your family, and what is best for it for their education. Also, please know that the websites I include have not been thoroughly researched, but only partly researched. There is some evolutionary content (ex. speaking of the world being millions of years old) in some of the websites, so please research them thoroughly before using them with your family! I promise you that I’ve done the best I can with everyone in mind, trying to include sites/ideas/activities for younger through older children, and keeping different learning styles and teaching methods in mind. Please use this study as it works best for your family, and most of all, have TONS of fun while doing it !!!! This is my very favorite picture book in the world. It’s been a blessing to share this with you! --Tracy Q.

FARM LIFE
This book is a tribute to the American farm and all of its charms. Discuss with your child what the trials and joys of living a farm life would be. You might even do a Venn Diagram of two different lives, city life vs. farm life for example. Here is a Venn Diagram online:

Farming maps- to go along with the above project, or to do alone, this project can be done using a US Map or a World Map, depending upon what you decide. Find a bigger map, and as you study different farming through the US and/or the world, cut out pictures from magazines, draw pictures, or find pictures on the internet of the different crops that are grown, and animals that are raised in farming. Cut them small, and attach them to the map where that crop or animal is grown or raised. When finished, you’ll have made a hands on map of farming and agriculture in the US, and/or the world to display, and as part of your portfolio. These sites may help:

Study world farming through research of books, atlases, encyclopedias, and the internet on farming around the world. Find the different crops that are grown, and animals that are raised in farming through the various resources, and document through pictures, maps, report writing, and lists what you’ve learned. Make a world farming notebook. Usborne’s Understanding Geography World Farming is a fantastic resource for this project. There are also many projects in the book as well. Here are some websites to help:

FAMILY HISTORY
In All the Places to Love, the family farm holds three generations in one family; the grandparents, the parents, and the children. This would be a great way to begin a family history study and project.

Ideas for Projects on Family History:

Make a family tree beginning as far back as you remember up to this point in time. Discuss how it was more uncommon to move away from family in years past, and that many families stayed closer together as it was more difficult to travel back then, and that family was very important to each other for living and helping each other, as is evident in this book.

Choose a person in your family, maybe a grandparent and make a timeline of their life. Add pictures and interview other family members and friends of that person to get your information for their life timeline. You can add important events in history that happened during that person’s lifetime to show what was happening in the world at certain times during their life.

SCIENCE/HEALTH:

FARM ANIMALS:
Everybody loves farm animals, and there are several in this book, and a few surprise animals as well. Look through All the Places to Love, and list all of the animals you find in this book that you find on the farm, and then add to the list more animals on a farm that is not yet on the list. Pick an animal from the list and research it. If it’s a farm animal such as a sheep or a horse, make a book with the different breeds of that animal, one on each page. Write a brief report or list the information for each breed with a picture of it on each page. (See links section for help researching on the web).

baby: lamb

FARM EQUIPMENT/MACHINES/TOOLS
Farmers use a lot of equipment to do their work. Their work is very hard. Farm equipment and machines has changed throughout the years. In the picture in All the Places to Love, Eli’s dad loves the area where crops are planted the most. He loves the soil. In that illustration with he and Eli, there is a plow driven by horses. Horses were very important to early farming. Discuss all of these things with your student. Research it, and see how far technology has come. Have your child research, document, draw, find pictures, etc., and add them to your notebook on this study. See links section for help with research.

WILDFLOWERS
On the page in the meadow, you see beautiful wildflowers scattered among the grass. Look through a wildflower field guide (you can find them in the library), and see how many wildflowers you have seen or recognize. Here is an online nature guide: http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/intermediate.asp?curGroupID=11

Collect different wildflowers. Identify them and press them in a big book between two paper towels, or use a flower press if you have one. Make a pretty wildflower picture with them, or make your own wildflower field guide with the pressed flowers attached to beautiful papers, and labeled with nice printing. Here is a wonderful example of what nature journal pages can look like: http://homemade.truepath.com/nexamples.htm

CROPS/PLANTING
Choose a flower you may see in the meadow or even in your yard that are wild, and buy seeds or try to find them and grow them in your house, and see how plants grow. You can study plant life, and draw and label the parts of your plant. See links section for websites.

WEATHER
A farmer relies very much on the weather to help him grow a good crop. Weather is an important part of a farmer’s daily living, and providing for their family.

CLOUDS
There is a page in the book where the mom, grandma, and Eli are on the hilltop, and the sky is filled with billowy, pretty clouds. You could research different clouds, and their characteristics. Identify clouds outside throughout the study. Lie on the ground on a blanket, and see what cloud pictures you can see (pictures of animals, things that the clouds look like) as they float by. If doing lapbooking or notebooking ,you could do a cloud booklet, and add it to it. You could also talk about how clouds tell us what the weather is going to be.

SEASONS
A farm changes throughout the year, and the seasons. Study the different seasons and the changes that occur. Relate this to how it would affect a farm, a farmer, and his family. How would winter be different on a farm than the summer? Add your work to your notebook for this study. A wonderful book to read for this is A Year at Maple Hill Farm by Alice and Martin Provensen. See links section for website suggestions.

BUOYANCY
One of the illustrations shoes Grandma sending a boat with a message down the river. It is her favorite place to be. Fill a large pan with water, and gather some items together for testing buoyancy, for example, a penny, a rubber glove, a sponge, (just look around the house to see what you have and what may be good for this activity/experiment). Before each item, have everyone guess what will sink and what will float, and write down the predictions, and the outcome. Talk about buoyancy, and the principle of it. For older children, these websites will help you explain it, http://theory.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_tech/node67.html and http://www.engineering.usu.edu/jrestate/workshops/buoyancy/buoyancy.php
There is a good book, Usborne’s Science Activities books series that has a book called, Science With Water. I’m sure your library has some other wonderful resources as well if you care to take this study further.

TRACKING/SIGNS
In the book, there is a passage of text that says, “Under the beech tree was a soft, rounded bed where a deer had slept. The bed was warm when I touched it.” In another passage, it says, “And wild turkeys left footprints for us to find.”

Reading the text, while looking at the illustration where the “deer had slept”, ask your child how the child in the story knows a deer had slept in this spot? Talk about what the author means by the “wild turkeys leaving footprints to find”.

Talk about tracking, and the signs that we may find in nature, which are clues to help us solve puzzles and learn about the natural world around us.

Jim Arnosky has written a couple of wonderful books you could look for in the library. His books on this subject are, Crinkleroot’s Guide to Animal Tracking, Field Trips: Bug Hunting, Animal Tracking, Bird-watching, Shore Walking, and Crinkleroot's Book of Animal Tracks and Wildlife Signs. See links section for more activities and a track guide.

BERRIES
One of the illustrations shows a pretty basket of blueberries. On a shopping trip before this study, bring home several varieties of berries (ex. blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, etc.). Have a taste test to see which is the favorite. Talk about how each one is grown. Find pictures of how they grow online, and add the labeled pictures to your portfolio for this study.

Buy enough berries so that you can make a mixed berry pie to have for dessert. Don’t forget the ice cream!

BIOMES
biome-1. a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna adapted to the particular conditions in which they occur. 2. the geographical region containing such a community.

In the story of All the Places to Love, each person had their favorite place on the farm that was special to them. You can choose to study the different biomes and the flora (plant life), and fauna (animal life) that are unique to each one. Discuss biomes of the world and define them and learn what’s unique to each one of them for a deeper study.

On the farm: meadow, river, fields, woods, hilltop, pond, marsh
Around the world: tundra, rainforest, taiga, desert, temperate, grasslands

There are some great books on this subject in the library, and some wonderful websites to use for resources online:

This is a passage from the book, at the end of the book that you can use as copywork/dictation with your children. For younger students, you can only have them use the portion of the text on bold. What a beautiful text this is!

AUTHOR STUDY
Meet the Author, Patricia MacLachlan through these websites. Your child can read her biography, and learn about her life. You can include her picture and biography in their notebooks. Take some of her other books from the library, and read more of them. Discuss her writing style, and enjoy her fantastic work!

REPETITION
Repetition is a literary devoice authors use to bring interest to a story. It is a great way to tie the story together from start to finish. In this story, there are several examples of repetition. Try to see if your student can find them. They include:

*All the Places to Love, each one had their different favorite place, but it was

*Carrying on shoulders, the mom carrying Eli, then him saying he’ll carry his sister in his

SIMILE
Simile is a literary device that compares something in the story to something else using the words like or as. In All the Places to Love, there are at least three examples of this.

2- “Leather harnesses hang like paintings against old wood; and hay dust floats like gold in the air”

Have your student write a few similes or write a few of them with your student by finishing these with like or as…….

You can come up with some of your own as well. See links section for additional websites.

DESCRIPTIVE WRITING
Descriptive writing is writing that doesn’t only tell, but shows. It makes you feel like you’re right there in the midst of what’s happening. Patricia MacLachlan uses descriptive writing in a very beautiful way. For example, in All the Places to Love, she writes, “When spring rains came and the meadow turned to marsh, cattails stood like guards, and killdeers called. Ducks nested by the marsh marigolds, and the old turtle-his shell all worn- no matter how slow, still surprised me.

She makes you feel like you there, and shows you, through her writing, what the marsh looks like through the use of her descriptive words. Discuss this with your child, and have them try some descriptive writing by giving them a topic for a sentence or two to write about it. Websites to help are included in the links section.

NARRATION/WRITING
In the story, each person had their favorite place on the family farm that was very special to them.

Have your younger child narrate to you while you type, or older child write a short essay on where their favorite place to be is, and why. Ask them to try to use some similes in it, and descriptive writing, like Patricia MacLachlan does.

MATH:

COUNTING
For your younger students, counting is an excellent skill to learn. You can count by ones, twos, threes, etc., and helps to build the skills of multiplication eventually. There are many things to count in All the Places to Love. You can count birds, and animals through the book. You can count the flowers on the page where the mom, grandma, and Eli are at the hilltop. Count the clouds in the sky. Do some practice skip counting with a tape or use toothpicks or popsicle sticks to count by ones, twos, threes, etc. Show your student beginning place value and group your sticks in tens, showing tens and ones, and even hundreds if they are at that point in their math studies. It’s wonderful to bring in fun ways to learn math!

MATH ON A FARM
Ask your students how math might be used on a farm? I’m sure there are many amazing ways! List them and put them in your notebook. Here are a few websites to help:

PATTERNS
On both pages where the babies are born, the mom is lying in the bed with the same quilt on it. The patterns and colors in quilts are so beautiful. Patterning is a neat way to learn about shapes, sizes, and colors in math. Use pattern blocks and have your children come up with interesting and pretty quilt patterns for math. Here are some websites for learning with quilts for math:

QUILTING
Quilts were a very beautiful part of family tradition. You see in both pages that in the book where the babies were born, the mom is lying in bed with the same quilt on her. It was a very important skill in the colonial days and westward expansion to know, as people didn’t buy their blankets, they sewed quilts to keep warm. You can study the history of quilting, and read some of the many wonderful books that use quilts in the title.

You could have your child design a quilt pattern, then try to sew their own quilt block. They could even sew more than one, and sew them together for a wall hanging for their bedroom, or work hard all year on this, and together, you could sew a family quilt or a quilt for their hope chest. See the websites in the links section to help you get started.

WOOD CARVING
Grandpa carved the names of each family member on the beam in the family barn. What a nice tradition! You could practice wood carving with children, but please be careful! Look at different crafters work, and admire their talent too! See the websites in the links section.

BAKING/COOKING
The women on the farm are a very important part to keep things running smoothly. It is a hard life, filled with so many jobs/chores and hard work for everyone, including the women on the farm. But cooking and baking is one of those very important, and difficult jobs. Here is an account of what it was like to live on a farm a long time ago, and how modern conveniences are a good thing to this person: http://www.thecolefamily.com/mellie/660118.htm

Do some baking and cooking farm style. Serve a big farm breakfast, or a grand dinner like one would serve on the farm. Research online to find some recipes, and what cooking and baking is like on the farm. Plan out your meal, and write for each recipe, where these ingredients came from, what type of farming was done to get them, and how did they get to your table? See links section to get started cooking up farm style.

There are many other practical skills/homemaking that you could study for this study for example, sewing, car/machine repair, veterinary medicine, and many more. See what you can come up with.

ILLUSTRATOR STUDY
Here is Mike Wimmer’s website. http://www.mikewimmer.com/
Go through the children’s books section on his site, and take some of the other books he’s illustrated out to look through.
Read his biography on his site: http://www.mikewimmer.com/frame-about.html
You can look through his portfolio there, and see his exquisite talent!

Detail
Look at the detail in Mr. Wimmer’s work, and compare it to the softness and subtleness of some of the illustrations, in the same piece of work. He has a way of showing you truly how someone looks, the details in the face while painting soft beauty around them. See this throughout his work in the book.

Look at the color he uses, and how colorful he makes his illustrations. Try to do this for an art project emulating some of his work. Remember, if you’re painting water or a mirror as in his work, you need to add the reflections in based on the light that would be in the room! Notice that detail in his work as well, and include it in your own.

FIELD TRIPS:

Take a visit to a local farm. Try to find different farms in your area that will allow you to come and learn about farm life and farming. Dairy farms are fascinating! Here’s a website to help you stay safe: http://kidshealth.org/parent/firstaid_safe/home/farm_safety.html

Go to a farmer’s market, or the grocery store if you can’t find one, and look at all of the different produce there that are grown on farms. Look at the different meat at the supermarket, and the different cuts of meat, and how it’s packaged and sold in so many different ways.

Choose one type of produce (apples or cabbage or potatoes or onions, etc.), and look at the different varieties of just one type of produce. Make a booklet on the various varieties of it for your notebook. You can really learn a lot!

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