Henry the Castaway

In October we rowed the book Henry the Castaway.  It is a cute story about a boy who has an adventure when he leaves his home to explore the great unknown.

We basically stuck to the activities in the manual for this Five in a Row study.  We:
-discussed what the word "castaway" means
-listed the survival skills Henry uses
-counted up all the animals in the illustrations by using tally marks
-learned about kingfishers and watched them dive for fish on Youtube
-Henry's dog Angus is a Scottish Terrier.  We learned a little about them here.
-We read Penny's World and discussed maps.  K drew a map of the things she would like to see on her own imaginary island.

Like Henry, Christopher Columbus was an avid explorer.  Since we rowed this book around Columbus Day, we took some time to learn about this famous explorer.  We started by looking at a globe to see how Columbus wanted to reach the Far East, but wound up in the New World instead.  We read several books about Columbus.  We pretended K was an explorer by making her a Columbus-style hat..

 and she filled out a Captain's Log similar to the journals Columbus kept by listing *important* events of her life.

We were also real explorers ourselves and visited a park we had never been to before.  This park was in a kind of a canyon with lots of trees and had a walking path that somewhat followed a meandering stream.  It felt like we were really in a forest even though the sounds of nearby traffic never completely disappeared.  The kids were, of course, endlessly fascinated by the stream and frequently stepped off the path to play/examine it more closely.  We talked about river currents and K was able to figure out which direction was upstream and which was downstream.

It was a great day.

The kids seem to love acting out the FIAR stories we row, so we finished the unit by acting out the story, using different parts of the house for the different locations in the story.  They really got into it and made little flags to mark their path, etc.  They liked packing backpacks for their journey, complete with flashlights and making a tent with blankets and chairs.

Another fun row!