Author and illustrator: Stacy Chbosky
Summary: A young boy learns a hard truth,yet perseveres.
Social Studies(history, civil war,slavery)
This book provided a jumping off point to discuss slavery, discrimination and the Civil war. We placed our story disks on the southern part of the United States. We read some books on the civil war and slavery. We also learned about how some slaves worked on cotton plantations. Lily and Aj saw a video on u-tube about how cotton gins work. We learned about cotton plants and we made a picture of a cotton plant using cotton balls and construction paper.
Art(making recycled ink and quill pens)
We spent a morning making homemade ink using strawberries, vinegar and salt. We mashed up the strawberries and added all the ingredients. When the ink was done we practiced writing and drawing pictures with the feathers we had found outside.
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Science(seasons, simple machines, five senses)
We talked about our five senses: sight,smell,touch,taste and hearing. Their are many descriptive phases in this book so its makes it easy to discuss this subject. I decided to make Lily and Aj their favorite snack and we talked about our senses while eating it. Lily and Aj said that the popcorn tastes salty, smells buttery, sounds crunchy, feels bumpy and looks fluffy! We also did a worksheet, read a couple books and watched a movie!
There are simple machines included in this story. We decided to learn about levers,fulcrums and inclined planes. When we were learning about Levers we used Scissors,a card board tube, a ruler and blocks. Lily cut the cardboard tube in half and put the ruler on top. Then Lily and Aj tried to make the blocks balance on top of the ruler. They wanted to see how many blocks they could balance.We also made an inclined plane with a box and a can. Lily and Aj tried dropping eggs straight down using our hands. We learned that the eggs just crack when dropped but if you use an inclined plane the eggs roll down with out cracking. We also watched a movie and read some books about machines.
This story begins in spring and continues into summer. I decided to review the seasons. We read 3 books about the seasons. Lily and Aj made a seasons flip book. They also planted cat grass seeds and watched it grow.
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Math(counting)-
We counted the stars,flowers and tree stumps in the book. We then cut out stars from paper and made different patterns with them. Lily and Aj also used the stars to group them by 3's and 5's.
Language arts(list Making and question marks)-
We made a list of things that are to wonderful to own. Lily wrote her own list and Aj dictated the list to me and I wrote it down for him. We also drew pictures to go along with our lists! This Book "Who owns the sun?" was a great opportunity to introduce the use of question marks. We talked about how they are used and we tried to find them in the story as we were reading it.
