Who Owns The Sun
We’ve been doing some more Five in a Row recently and this week we did Who Owns the Sun by Stacy Chbosky for the first time. I do still enjoy the five in a row style of things and M is old enough now at almost 8 to cover some of the harder topics and to do something with lapbooks now and again. Not that lapbooks are necessary to FIAR, but it is nice to do them once in a while. I love how much we find to discuss in FIAR stories and the art lessons are really handy, because I don’t know much about art. We don’t necessarily organise ourselves to do one activity from one subject area per day; I kind of play it by ear and see which things seem like they’ll appeal to M.
On the first day we read the story and then talked about things being too beautiful to own. We looked at the illustrations and the simplicity in the pictures of things the son asks questions about and we talked about which was M’s favourite picture and how it ight have been painted. M made a list of things he thinks are too wonderful to be owned by anyone. Then he had a go at painting his own version of his favourite picture in watercolours and did a second picture along the same lines but this time of some things off the list he made.
On the second day we read the story again and this time M had to point out instances of similes and personification. We’ve covered these and metaphors several times before, so it was a basic review and then trying to spot them in the story. M made flap books to show examples of personification and similes from the story.
On the third day we did some science and talked about healthy eating and went back over the food pyramid idea. This time we did it as a plate of food split into sections showing how much of each food group to eat at a sitting (using a fridge magnet from the BBC Big Challenge). Then we split circles up into sections and M put the father’s lunch items into the correct categories, made a generic food plate example and also planned a healthy lunch, drawing pictures of the items.
The next day we covered slavery which has come up before. We’ve only really talked about slaves in the south of the USA before though (e.g. in Follow the Drinking Gourd) so this time I brought in more information about how Britain was involved in slavery. M completed a map about the slave trade triangle but started getting upset when I asked him to narrate back some info about slavery, because he said it was too upsetting to think about. So we didn’t go on to look at this Slaves’ Stories website I’d found. This is what he narrated instead.
On the 5th day (we didn’t do it Monday to Friday, but fitted in 5 days over a bit longer than a week) we looked at symbolism in the story and especially the trees and how they fit with the events on each page. We also talked about the author a little. Then we got together all the booklets and pictures M had made/found and put them together to make the lapbook. This shows how the opened out folders are arranged.
Then the flap on the right folds in and the slavery things are on the back.
And this is the front cover when the lapbook is folded up completely.
