Storm in the Night

Over the last few months I've worked on getting my FIAR posts caught up, then gotten busy with other projects and forgotten all about this poor little blog.  I'll try again.  I'd like to try to at least do quick descriptions of the books we rowed last year.  It's going to be hard to remember all we did, but for some of the books (including this one), I'd started blog posts about our activities soon after we rowed the book and never published the post.  Storm in the Night, which we rowed in mid-October,  I almost skipped.  It was the only Volume 1 book we hadn't rowed, but T had a very strong fear of thunderstorms, and I didn't know how rowing a book about them would affect him.  At the encouragement of a friend (thanks, Joelle!), we rowed it after all.  As it turned out, it went very well!   

This book kind of reminded me of Who Owns the Sun? in that it has a storyline that features lots of dialogue before anything "happens".  There were a lot of topics for study, as usual.

First we talked about contrast in weather.  Each kid thought of a mini-story describing a storm and sunshine.  Here's T's that he dictated to me.  I thought he described a thunderstorm quite vividly.

Lightning struck the rescue tree.  The thunder shook everything, including me.  Rain washes off everything that got dirty.  Black clouds stuck together.  The wind tried to break the house.

At last, thunder and lightning took the last crashes.  The next morning everyone was happy.  The sun had cleared away the black clouds.

I'd discussed onomonopoeia with K in previous years, and we revisited it again with this umbrella project.  First I read the lively book Rain Stomper, which is filled the sound words of a passing storm.  K wrote an onomonopoeia story.  Then K and T thought of their favorite weather sound words and made these umbrellas:

 

 

After discussing some of the differences between Thomas and his grandfather, we moved into a talk about aging in general.  There are plenty of Youtube videos that show actual facial photos of people morphing from children into adults. I found them slightly creepy, but interesting nonetheless.  This one shows a small boy growing into a man of ninety in three minutes.

 

We also talked about sources of light and brainstormed as many as we could think of.  We looked through the pictures of Storm in the Night and found the three sources of light shown in the illustrations.  Then we went into the garage where it was almost pitch dark and lit a match.  It is always amazing how much light such a tiny flame can give off in darkness.  It was a nice opportunity to talk about Jesus being the Light in our dark world.

 

Another topic of study was clouds.  K had learned about them in earlier years, so this was a review for her.  We read some books to learn more about clouds and K did a little extra research on her own.   We went outside to observe what clouds were visible that day, and they obliged by displaying good examples of cirrus, stratus, and even a bit of cumulus.  We also looked at artwork with many types of clouds.  DailyPainters.com has a search option where you can look for paintings with a subject of your choosing, and we found some great pictures of clouds when we did a search on storms.   To wrap up our cloud day, we made cloud parfaits with blue jello and CoolWhip.  K and T loved making their own treats.

 

 

 

We finished our time with this book by learning about thunderstorms.  We tried making our own "lightning" by rubbing a balloon against the carpet for a long time, then touching a doorknob-- but nothing happened.  Maybe our house is too well grounded?  T seemed to be relieved that this experiment was unsuccessful; I think he was afraid it was going to result in real lightning and thunder.