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Our week with Lentil!

This week we rowed through the book  "Lentil" by Robert McCloskey . We had a lot of fun with this book. Besides following the pages in the FIAR guide for Lentil, there's so many great additional activities you can follow. I guess that applies to all the stories in the Five in a Row Curriculum!

I had so much fun recreating the cover of Lentil.



McCloskey is the writer and illustrator of "Lentil". In this story his illustrations are made with charcoal. I introduced charcoal to the kids with a drawing I made of the harmonica featured in the story.



My Daughter's Pictures: First one is like my harmonica but white charcoal pencil against black paper. The second is black, brown, blue and green charcoal against white paper





My Son's Picture



We also discussed taste since there's a part in the book where everyone puckers their lips at the sight of someone eating a lemon. We looked at a diagram of the tongues taste buds and taste tested lemon juice to identify sour, unsweetened cocoa powder for bitter, sugar for sweet, and salt for salty. The kids enjoyed it. They each drew food that represented the 4 taste buds and we pasted them under the corresponding taste bud word. Template can be found at Homeschool Share.






For a scrapbook, we glued a plastic sleeve to hold the kids charcoal drawings... They're quite messy! The kids each chose what they wanted to color. The book took place in Ohio. So my daughter colored the Ohio bird and flower (Cardinal and Scarlet Carnation). My son colored the US and Ohio flag and they both practiced their writing by writing vocabulary words and their definitions. I'll post pictures soon.

The best activity we did was soap whittling. A character in the book (Old Sneep) is whittling wood and I wanted to give the kids an idea of how it's done. My good friend from Snoopy Girl from Eclectic Musings also rowed Lentil and wanted to do it but didn't get the chance. So she was kind enough to give me the idea of soap whittling. So here's what we came up with...

We used popsicle sticks to slowly whittle down the soap...



Sometimes we would use a plastic knife to carve out bigger chunks. Even though it's a plastic knife, I still helped my son carve it out.



The popsicle stick was perfect for smoothing out their sculptures. I have to learn to let go and let them do it themselves, but I spent an hour on each one smoothing it out. They would come back from time to time and help me out. It was very therapeutic! lol



Here's their finished sculptures! My son wanted a mushroom and my daughter a dog bone.

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