Lentil

This week we continued with our quiet time and calendar time in the mornings. In Handwriting, we worked on the letter E. And in the afternoons, we continued daily with our math and reading lessons. For our unit study, we looked at Lentil by Robert McCloskey. Lentil is the story about a boy living in Alto, Ohio in the 1940’s who couldn’t sing or whistle but became an expert at the harmonica and saved the town’s parade from Old Sneep’s sour sabotage. We enjoyed the story and it gave us the opportunity to talk about what makes us unique.

On Monday, we traveled from China with Ping all the way to Ohio with Lentil. When we learn about a new story, we make a story disc and put it on our world map. We talked about America and patriotism and Captain America, of course. We also looked at music and sound and experimented with why the harmonica sound “improved by 100%” in the bath tub”.

Ignore the stripe on my bathtub...

On Tuesday, we read our story and studied art. We noticed that most of the artwork is done with charcoal. Since pencils are very similar to charcoal, we practiced drawing Lentil and worked on shading. In the book, Old Sneep sits on a bench a whittles. Apparently, there are several YouTube videos of people who whittle all sorts of things from blocks of wood- like spoons, bowls, even decorations. Silas practiced whittling with a bar of soap, toddler knives, and toothpicks since Mom wouldn’t give a piece of wood and a pocket knife ;) We practiced teaching Ezra about facial expressions (something he knows too well) and we also made fresh squeezed lemonade. This was super delicious and Chef Silas was very into this idea and said we should have a lemonade stand. We also had lentil soup for dinner, it reminded us a little bit like chili.

 

On Wednesday, we talked about being different is okay. Lentil couldn’t sing and couldn’t whistle but he did learn how to play the harmonica extra well. We talked about the things that make Silas and Ezra different. Ezra loves to catch lizards and touch bugs. Silas hates to touch bugs and runs from lizards but both things are okay. Silas loves roller coasters and bounce houses. Ezra does not. God made us all different and that’s great!

 

Thursday is our science and game day. In the morning, we talked about sour lemons and how they make our face pucker. We learned the way we taste is through our taste buds and also our sense of smell. Silas learned the location of our salty, sweet, bitter, and sour taste buds and we did an experiment where we tried each of these flavors with a dropper on our different taste bud locations. It was really funny and Silas would say that the flavor was strongest with the appropriate taste bud! Silas also tested how smell affects taste and pinched his nose while he ate two different yogurt flavors. He said he couldn’t tell a difference but maybe it is because of his tonsils being so large. We colored our taste bud worksheet and noticed that we should make an American flag for our Lentil pages of our book.

Lentil was a fun story and Silas enjoyed it, you know Cap’ loves anything to do with America! :)