Very Last First Time

Very Last First Time was the intriguing title to our first Five in a Row book of the new year.  It is about Eva, an Inuit girl who gets to hunt for mussels under the Arctic ice on her own for the first time.  There is some suspense in the story as Eva gets lost and hears the roar of the incoming tide gradually coming closer.

We began by discussing first time experiences.  It was kind of fun that when K wrote the date on her activity page, it was her very last first time to write the date for 2013!

Other activities were:
--Looking through magazines and cutting out pictures of clothing appropriate for the four seasons and making a mini-book.

--Since K has a tendency to get worked into a tizzy if something important to her goes wrong (then again, who doesn't?), we took the opportunity to discuss What to Do in a Crisis.
Calm down
Don't panic
Be quiet
Think carefully
What am I supposed to do?
This was also a good day to talk about what the Bible says about fear.  We looked up several verses (Is 41:10; Ps 27:1, 14; Ps 56:3) and K chose her favorite one to copy down into her notebook (Duet 31:6).

--Learned about the Inuit.

--Learned about the tides and did an activity to see how Eva could have walked under the ice to collect mussels.  I filled a glass loaf pan with water and put it into the freezer for about 2 hours.  After this time it had frozen across the top, but the water was still liquid underneath.  We used a Lego figure to show how the ice was solid to walk on.  Then I punched a hole in one end and poured the water out to show the tide receding.  Then the kids took turns walking the Lego man under the ice to collect "mussels".

The kids, especially T, thought this was fascinating.  They couldn't play with it very long though, before it melted.

--K and T also had fun acting out the story.  "I want to be the tide," said T when we began talking about how to act out the different parts of the story.

Climbing down a hole to get under the ice

 

 

Finding and collecting mussels

Examining a tide pool

 

In the last picture, it being just after Christmas, we pretend the wrapping bows were sea urchins.  The kids had great fun with this.  They always enjoy acting out the stories we row.

 

--Lastly, we learned about pointillism and K tried a painting in this style.

 

This book was a lot of fun and really captured the kids' imaginations.  They did a lot of pretending to go under the ice collecting mussels for weeks after we rowed this book.