01 Mar Five in a Row: Very Last First Time

Despite being in the middle of winter, here, we started rowing our Five in a Row book, Very Last First Time on a day in January when the temperature was 75 degrees!  Clark and Luci have been longing for snow, so I thought this book would be a great start.  Or at least we can pretend!

Book Review

This story is about a young Inuit girl, Eva, who goes alone under the ice to hunt mussels on the sea floor.  She is very excited about the adventure but loses track of time.  She is then faced with the fear of not getting out from under the ice on time.

Clark was full of questions when we first read the book.  So many questions, in fact, that I felt a little overwhelmed with all of the information we would need to cover!  Who are the Inuit?  What is the tide? Do you know what mussels are?  What happens if the person doesn’t get out from underneath the ice?  Why did God not make us like ducks so that we could just dive down and get the mussels?  Haha!  Seriously.

Being that Clark is very visual, I found him this video on YouTube that showed mussel gathering under the ice.  How fascinating and crazy is this?!

Clark asked about the ducks because we continued on to watch a few more videos, including the one below.  He thought this way looked a lot easier and a lot less scary!

Geography

I am a Canadian, so I wanted the country to be somewhat of a focus for our Geography study with this book.  It would be nice for Clark and Luci to feel a connection to Canada, even though we don’t make it there very often.  We started by learning to identify the Canadian flag.  They both colored a picture of the flag.

I found these unit studies on Canada on Homeschool Share.  There is also a Very Last First Time Lapbook, which we used.  Clark and Luci cut them out to make little booklets for our Unit Study Lapbook.

We then worked at finding Canada on the map.  Clark knew where it was, as we had talked about Canada before, identifying where Grandma and Grandpa and many of his cousins live.  He was even able to identify a few familiar cities with his magnifying glass.

The next challenge was to find Ungava Bay, where the story took place.  We talked about what a bay was – a body of water connected to the ocean or lake, which looks like a half circle in the shoreline.  This gave Clark some idea of what to look for.  He quickly found Hudson Bay and then Ungava Bay.

Clark had lots of questions about living in the far North, so I pulled up YouTube to get a visual.  This video gave a nice overview of the area (Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital city), pointing out a lot of the unique characteristics of the area.  Clark watched with interest, asking a TON of questions.

Exploring Inuit Culture

We talked about some of the differences between here in the South, and the North.  Clark noted that in the far North, there appeared to be a lot of snow.  The houses also looked different and there were no trees.  He thought it looked very cold because the people in the videos and pictures were all wearing parkas.  We made a couple of very adorable little Inuit girls, wearing cozy parkas, which I blogged about HERE.

At the local library, we checked out some books and learned what we could about the Inuit culture.  We found a series of short videos about Nunavut Life, and listened to some traditional Inuit throat singing.  I have always love learning about other cultures and am fascinated by the diversity and richness of it.  I hope Clark and Luci can grow up to enjoy and appreciate these differences.

Clark and Luci were particularly interested in Igloos, so we watched this video to show us How to Build an Igloo. We then thought we would try our hand at building an igloo.  Since we don’t have snow, we used marshmallows.  I blogged about this HERE.

Language

This row was an introduction to the concept of a title to Clark.  We talked about how every story has a title;  sometimes the title can tell you what the story is about and sometimes it is mysterious.  I had Clark write a story about something he did for the very last first time, including a title.  He wrote a hilarious story about when he was about 18 months old and we took him to the park.  He started to run and he ran and ran and ran until he got to the fence at the end of the park!  It was his last time doing that because running that much made him tired.

We also used an igloo sight words sheet I found online.  It wasn’t very challenging for Clark, but I altered it for Luci and she just LOVED it.  She loves coloring and was pretty proud of herself, reading each word and coloring the correct, corresponding block.

Art

I thought the suggested art concepts were a little too advanced for my little scholars.  Instead, I decided to do something that would incorporate a little more of the information that we had learned about the north.  I was specifically thinking about the Aurora Borealis.  In searching for ideas, I came across a blog, That Artist Woman, who had done something similar with her grade 1 students, so I figured it was doable for us.  I loved how she creatively used different things from the kitchen to create great effects.  We used Epsom salts, salt and food coloring in water to create glittering, crystallized aurora borealis!  You can read about our painting project HERE.

Math

For math it was suggested that we review ordinal numbers, but Clark had covered this well in his Horizons Math.  Instead, we found some really great word problems in the Very Last First Time Lapbook.  You can never do too many word problems (although Clark may disagree with this!)

Science

There were a ton of subjects that we could explore in science.  Clark was interested in salt water, so I we did a couple of experiments together in order to explore the properties of salt in water.  Our first experiment was the Super Simple Salt Water Evaporation Experiment, which I blogged about HERE.  In this experiment I introduced the Scientific Method as a guideline for our experiments.

The second experiment we did was a lot of fun.  We made snowflakes covered in ice crystals.  I blogged about this HERE, if you would like more details.  I definitively recommend doing this with the kids!

This was a very interesting study with lots of different subjects.  We took our time, exploring all the different aspects that Clark and Luci became really interested in.  Stay tuned for our next Five in a Row study!