Category: Five in a Row

Last week we “rowed” Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews and Ian Wallace. This is a really beautiful book about an Inuit girl, Eva, who walks under the ice at low tide to collect mussels. This is a rite of passage for Eva who will be making this journey alone for the first time – her very last first time. It’s a very suspenseful story. Eva gets lost under the ice and her candle goes out as she can hear the tide coming in. There is just enough suspense to take a child to the edge of what they can handle without going too far.

The illustrations in this book are incredible – full of interesting details that provide a ton of information about Inuit culture. We learned a lot through this book and had a really great week.

Language Arts
Henry decided, on his own, to right a sea themed version of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? It was entitled Blue Crab, Blue Crab, What Do You See? Henry isn’t one for drawing, but I was proud that he did color the pictures he chose from the internet. He was pretty proud of himself too.

Helen was also pretty proud of her crab picture.

Social Studies/Geography/Art
We attempted to build an igloo out of ice cubes on a sheet of ice, but we couldn’t get the ice to stick together. The interwebs assured me that I could sprinkle salt on the ice to temporarily melt them enough to stick together, but the interwebs lied.

So the project morphed into chipping an ice hole and coloring the ice with Crayola markers in blues and purples. Our art topic from the book was warm versus cool colors, and so we used blues and purples to emphasize the coldness of the ice and to make it look like the illustrations in the book. The kids also added some of their plastic sea creatures to the scene. And note Henry’s “annuraaq.”

Math and Science
I sent Henry out to collect “mussels” from the yard to use in a demonstration of the tides. We got side tracked with counting and grouping the rocks.

Then we moved onto a demonstration of how when the tides go out, tide pools and dry land are left. He used a Star Wars figure to collect mussels on the bottom of the sea.

Science/Culture


We made a trip to the grocery store and purchased some mussels which Ryan ate for dinner. But first we dissected them. Henry used a butter knife (aka lever – we’ve been studying simple machines) to pry one open. And we looked up a few diagrams and videos online to figure out what we were looking at.

Music


I went looking online for some traditional Inuit music to play with dinner last night. I didn’t come across any Inuit folk streaming radio, but I did discover that “throat singing” is a traditional form of Inuit music. There’s a passage in the book where Eva hums  “far back in her throat to make the echoes rumble.” If we hadn’t been studying this book so deeply I never would have known that this was a reference to traditional Inuit music! Helen really enjoyed watching throat singers on YouTube. Here’s a brief demonstration:

As promised, here are some of Henry’s pictures from his experiments with perspective:

From the ground, looking up.

Sideways

Extreme close up

Self Portrait

He also decided to get creative all on his own today with flight based arts and crafts. For those of you who happen to know him, you know that this is extremely out of character. We created an art gallery to show daddy when he got home.

Here’s a self portrait of him watching an orange glider and a purple helicopter fly through the sky. He signed his name in blue.

I love this three dimensional airplane he created with scissors glue and tape. Completely on his own. The piece on the bottom keeps the airplane flying straight.

Finally, this picture has nothing to do with The Glorious Flight or flying, but it sparked a funny story.

I was pointing out to him how the colors and subject matter of his family portrait are similar to those of Michelangelo’s Holy Family (which was hanging in the hallway nearby). See the similarities? (Play along with me here. . .)

We have officially started our Five in a Row (FIAR) curriculum this week with the book The Glorious Flight by Alice and Martin Provensen.

For those unfamiliar with FIAR, it is a storybook/unit based curriculum designed for use with 4 to 8 year olds. You read each book every day for five days and each day do a subject related lesson. For example, on Mondays you might do social studies, Tuesdays art, etc. The suggested lessons are simple and sweet, and the potential for expanding the curriculum is limitless.

So as I said, we started with The Glorious Flight. This is the story of Louis Bleriot, an early French aviator who designed, built, and flew his own planes.  After 8 years, 11 planes, and many mishaps, Bleriot became the first pilot to cross the English Channel from France to England in a glorious (and dangerous!) 37 minute flight.

The first time we read this story, neither Henry nor I were terribly thrilled by it. I thought it would be like pulling teeth to get him to sit through it even one more time. Today we read it for the third time, and something amazing has happened. We’ve been able to see and appreciate the richness of the story, language, and art of the book. Now, those who have been “rowing” for awhile will silently chuckle I’m sure. For that is the point of FIAR – delving deeply into one book to truly mine its riches.

We have come to love the unflappable Papa Bleriot and his family, and we have found much to treasure in this beautiful book.

Here are some of the things we’ve done and learned with this book. I’ll try to break it out by subject.

Math and Science
We’ve spent a lot of time flying different kinds of paper airplanes, discussing which ones go the furthest and why. We’ve seen what shapes make better flyers, which glide best, which go the fastest, etc. These experiments led to a discussion of angles as I instructed Henry to launch a plane at a 45 degree angle and he asked what an angle is. So we got out paper and pencil, learned what an angle is, how a triangle has three angles, a square has four, etc. We learned about right angles, 180 degree angles, and 45 degree angles. Not too bad for not having a math curriculum!

We will supplement the science with The Way Things Work video on flight. As soon as I can get it from the library.

History and Social Studies
In addition to Louis Bleriot, we’ve learned about the Wright Brothers, Ruth Law, and Lt. Gail Halvorsen a.k.a. the Chocolate Pilot. We still have books to read about Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh and some other early pilots.

Through these books we’ve learned some geography. Henry now knows where France and England are on the map and that they are separated by the English Channel.  He’s learned that people in France speak French. He knows where to find Chicago and New York City on the map and that Chicago and NYC are cities in the states of Illinois and New York.

We’ve learned lessons of perseverance and the importance of making reparations. We’ve learned how much can be learned from making mistakes.

Language
One of the most “schooly” things I do with Henry is our “word of the day.” This is simply a word, chosen from the book and usually a verb, that I write on our chalk board. The first time I did this I was amazed at how much he learned from this simple lesson. I never say a word about it. I wait for him to notice it. He’ll either sound it out or ask me to read it for him. Then he’ll point out what he notices about it. This week we’ve discussed the “silent e” that makes the “i” say it’s name in the word glide. We reviewed the rule “when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking” with sail. And we learned that “y” is sometimes a vowel with the word fly.

We learned about onomatopia and will review the concept with tomorrow’s word of the day, CRASH!

My favorite language activity involved using the Lord Alfred Tennyson Poem, The Eagle. Henry loves it and I hope we’ll both have it memorized by the end of the week. Here’s the excerpt.

“Like a great swan, the beautiful glider rises into the air . . .  . . . and shoots down into the river with a splash that frightens the fishes.” 

We discussed how the images were similar and different and compared the language used by each author.