Category Archives: Grandfather’s Journey

Final project for Grandfather’s Journey

Today Elliot completed his final project for Grandfather’s Journey. I was really proud of him because I hadn’t actually planned on doing it and I kind of sprung it on him at the last minute of the day when it came to my mind, but he cooperated and ended up doing some of his very best work I’ve ever seen! He had a lot to say about his favorite bird, the Chickadee, and he diligently wrote it all out beautifully.

I found some great stickers at Hobby Lobby with all sorts of birds, and we were able to use our library book to identify a few of them, including the Chickadee!

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Frushi

As part of our Japanese theme, tonight we made made “frushi”. Elliot knows what sushi is and that it’s japanese, but he also knows that it’s not something he wants to try, so I thought this would be a fun way for him to pretend to eat sushi using his chop sticks. The rice didn’t hold together quite as well as we would have liked and really needed to be eaten with a fork, but the berries on top were perfect for practicing with chop sticks!

I sensed he was a bit nervous it was actual sushi with raw fish.

What a relief! It was delicious…no raw fish after all!

I was shocked by Caroline’s ability to use the chop sticks. She seemed to have more control over them than Elliot did. She has fantastic fine motor skills!

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More FIAR Fun

We’re finishing up our last week of reading Grandfather’s Journey before we take a break from homeschooling for a while for Christmas break. We’ve learned even more about Japan than we already knew from when we read A Pair of Red Clogs. We’ve also been learning about birds and Elliot has really taken interest in them. Elliot says that his favorite bird is the Chickadee, because he likes that they are small and that they say their own name when they chirp. Unfortunately with it being Winter, there aren’t a lot of birds around to observe. We bought a little bird treat to put in our backyard, in the hopes that we might attract some birds to watch, but no such luck. I’m making a mental note that when we do this book with Caroline in a few years, we might want to do it in the Spring!

Today was our language arts day for Grandfather’s Journey. We used our favorite method of learning our vocabulary words….a memory game! I simply write the words on half the cards and the definitions on the others, and we try to find matches. Our vocabulary words this time were: astonish, enormous, explore, marvel, bewilder, and homesick. After the game I asked him some questions to check his understanding of the words again. I asked him to tell me something he marveled at. He said “My Mom….because I admire her!” He’s such a sweet kid!

We also did our typical discussion on setting, characters, and plot. We have been discussing point of view a little bit too with the last few books and he finally has a solid understanding of what that means. About half of our books have been in first person point of view and half have been third person.

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Origami Night!

Since we’re learning about Japan, I thought it would be fun to try our hand at some origami. We had a fun evening trying a few things from our books we got from the library. If there’s one thing we learned, it’s that it’s a lot harder than it looks and it’s not for the impatient!


Blowing up my origami ball

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First Projects for Grandfather’s Journey

We enjoyed our first reading of Grandfather’s Journey today. Honestly, this is probably the one book that I wasn’t really looking forward to reading because when I first previewed it a few months ago, it didn’t seem very interesting to me. It’s funny what a difference it can make to read a children’s book with a child! Elliot found it very interested and he especially liked the illustrations, which I probably didn’t take time to notice when I first read it. It’s easy to forget that everything is so new to a child and you need to look at things through their eyes. He liked the book so much that he requested I get some of the other books listed on the back that are by this same author.

Here are a few projects we completed for our notebook.



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Grandfather’s Journey

This week we’ll start rowing Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say. We’ll be reviewing what we learned about Japan from back when we read “A Pair of Red Clogs”. We’ll also be learning about the Pacific Ocean, California, birds, and we’ll learn how to do origami.

We decided to place our story disk on California, since that is where Grandfather travels to and we already have a disk on Japan.

Some of the library books we’ll be reading….still waiting on a few to come in.

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