THE VERY LAST FIRST TIME || FIVE IN A ROW || FEB 2020

After returning from the kids first snow trip, I decided to pull out an old favorite: Very Last First Time. The story, about seven year old Eva's first time walking along the bottom of the sea by herself, opened up the opportunity for discussion of first time experiences, rite of passage, age, etc. Here is a peek inside our unit study.

We started the week by watching two documentaries - one about the Inuit culture and another about the Arctic Ocean.  

After reading books on weather and snow, we had a fun "snow" themed tea time.

 For geography, we located Canada and then Ungava Bay, colored the flag, and studied Greenland (as close as I could get geographically)  in Hungry Planet. The goal was to make some fry bread, but we never got around to it.

 

 For art, we pulled out an old Yellow Spot:Sun lesson on pointillism and discussed warm/cool colors.

For math we did two things. First, we discussed ordinal numbers, as suggested in the FIAR manual. We also attempted to build a sugar cube igloo, which was a concept Eli struggled to understand (pyramid, less sugar cubes needed on each layer, etc.) and I'm glad we took the time to give it a whirl.

Living at the beach, we also chose to discuss some other science topics listed in the manual, such as tides, biome, sea salt, and ocean life. There was a line in the book about Eva being tickled by an anemone and I look forward to our local aquarium (with a touch tank) to reopen so we can revisit this unit a bit.

Other topics for discussion presented in the manual include crisis thinking, family relationships, first time experiences, simple machines, and health (dressing for weather conditions).

Hope you enjoyed a little peek inside our third row through this book! Just for kicks, here's a link to the very first time we read Very Last First Time ;)