Rowing The Glorious Flight {FIAR}

Rose and I are on a roll with Five in a Row right now. We rowed two books in the last two weeks: The Glorious Flight and Very Last First Time. I kept both rows simple, but they were very much enjoyed. Today I am going to share what we did for The Glorious Flight, a book about Louis Bleriot and his attempts at building a machine that would fly....eventually all the way across the English Channel.

Here's what we did!

*Social Studies*

• We discussed how Papa handles the accident at the beginning of the book (which was his fault)... he apologizes and invites everyone to the cafe.

• We looked up the English Channel, England, and France on our globe. Rose was surprised to see that the English Channel looked so tiny on the globe, but she decided that it must be much bigger in real life:)

• We discussed the illustrations shown for England and France...castles, the White Cliffs of Dover, the French street scene, and more. We also talked about the historical elements in the illustrations, especially the differences between Papa's car and our own.

•  She didn't like the look of any of the recipes in the FIAR cookbook, so we opted for a soup and French bread night. I thought about making the bread, but it was a busy day so we picked a baguette from Trader Joe's instead. It was quite good!

 

 *Language Arts*

• We reviewed how the names of boats are written in stories. The Escopette is the boat that waits to pick up Papa if his motor fails.

• Using the manual, we reviewed onomatopoeia. We had discussed this before, back when we rowed Storm in the Night. This time we discussed the words chosen to represent the airship's sounds: "Clacketa, Clacketa" and the car accident: "Crump!".

*Art*

• We discussed perspective and viewpoint using notes in the manual. Some of the illustrations show people looking up, while others show them looking down.  

 

• Rose tried looking at her mug from straight on, from up above, and from down below. I gave her the option of drawing the mug from each perspective, but she wasn't feeling up to it, so we took photos instead. 

 

 

 

*Math*

• We briefly reviewed ordinal numbers.

• I introduced her to Roman numerals, with the help of this game. She loved it, and played twice. The object is to rebuild a Roman temple by correctly forming numbers using Roman numerals.  

*Science*
 

• We used the notes in the manual to discuss inventors and their inventions, focusing on the hard work that goes into coming up with something that works. Louis Bleriot went through 11 airships before he designed one that would fly properly!  Along the way, he had plenty of mishaps, but he kept trying. 

 

• We brainstormed a list of different ways to travel.  Our list: train, horse, sled, horse & wagon, airplane, ship, car, camel, on foot, bike, roller skates, scooter, skateboard, skis, snowshoes, motorcycle, bus, helicopter, hot air balloon, parachute, subway, and submarine. She found this pretty challenging, so I gave her little hints. 

We are just about finished with Very Last First Time, so that will be my next FIAR post.