Harold and the Purple Crayon

The first Five in a Row book we rowed for T's first grade year this year was Harold and the Purple Crayon.  This was my first time to row a book for the second time with a second child who was rowing it for the first time.  How's that for a convoluted sentence.  It was nice to already have an idea of what the activities were like and interesting to see how differently T approaches learning than K does.

 

Since T did basically the same activities as K did when she rowed the book, I'll just share a few pictures from this time around.

 

I wanted to explore hot air balloons a bit.  The kids were fascinated by them when we were able to visit a balloon launch last summer.  I wanted T to really understand how hot air expands and rises, and I researched making our own hot air balloon to launch, but all the directions I found were geared toward older kids and seemed to have an element of danger by using candles as a heat source to inflate the balloon.  In the end, we took the simple route by turning on our radiator style space heater.  I held a small square of tissue paper over the heater and let it go.  Instead of falling right away, the paper first floated upward before drifting out of the heater's range and falling.  Then we tried holding a lightweight plastic bag over the heater.

 

 

It puffed up quite nicely and would have gone floating up in the air if there had been a way to keep it level and stable.  It was interesting for T to observe how the bag wanted to float upwards even though there was no blowing air coming from the heater, only warmth.

After we were done with this experiment, T wanted to roll up his "balloon" into a bag the way we'd seen the real hot air balloons rolled up after the launch.

 

 

 

Another activity was to figure out how much pie Harold ate altogether if he ate one big slice from each of the nine pies as shown in the book illustrations.  When I did this with K, I cut out nine circles, each divided into thirds, and she figured out how much pie it came out to be if one third was eaten from each pie.  She very quickly figured this out and was done with the activity.  T, on the other hand, arranged all the pies, decided what flavor each was, then pretended to eat a slice from each, carefully rearranging the leftovers into new whole pies.

 

 

After he'd figured out the solution to this puzzle, he wasn't about to let all that good pie go to waste, and spent a long time continuing to pretend to eat slices and rearranging leftovers.  He did this until all the pie was gone.

 

 

For an art activity, we made a couple of crayon drawings using Ed Emberly's Big Purple Book, which I'd checked out from the library.  T enjoyed seeing how his pictures turned out.

 

Since Harold climbs a mountain to try to find out where he is, we took a family walk up a nearby tall hill to see how elevation changes one's view.

 



 

 

 

It was a great walk.  When the kids went dashing up the trail at the beginning of the hike, I thought they would tire quickly and want to go back.  But they ran or trotted uphill practically the whole way.  We didn't make it to the top  because we arrived at sunset and it was quickly becoming dark.  There was still a wonderful view and it was really good exercise.  B and I agreed we ought to be doing this sort of thing more often. 

 

This is a short post, but if you're interested in seeing the other activities we did, look at this post, which outlines what we did when K rowed Harold.

 

Tomorrow I will post K's first Volume 4 row!