We Begin Our Journey

I admit, we've read Paddle-to-the-Sea before, twice even. Once when Eldest was doing Ambleside Year Two, and once with Middle. We've thoroughly enjoyed it, but all the while I was dying to do more with it, as well as the rest of the Holling books. Well, that time has finally come. As a starting point, I got Beautiful Feet's Geography Through Literature Study Guide, and the accompanying maps. Then, after a vain search online for notebooking pages, I made some myself. I'm rather pleased with how they turned out, and how I was able to tailor them to fit with our other areas of study. I managed to tie in nature study, zoology, grammar, math, and creative writing. Of course, I've only completed pages for the first two lessons, but our first lesson today was successful enough to encourage me to keep it up.

First we talked about, and drew, sign of spring in Nipigon Country, as noted in the text. Then we talked about signs of spring where we live, which is a very different animal. No melting of the snow pack here, for example.

After that we watched some Youtube videos of Canadian Geese while the kids colored in a picture of one. Since we were discussing the principles of lift, thrust, and drag as it relates to the flight of birds yesterday in our zoology text, we took a little Youtube detour at that point to watch a video on how birds fly. As they finished coloring, I read to them a little more about the geese's habits, etc., and they wrote down a few of them.

Then we worked on a little sheet I had made up with the seven different animals mentioned in the first three chapters. I had pictures of the animals, their common names, and taxonomy. We used process of elimination to figure out which taxonomy matched which animal. Middle, an avid fan of the "Sisters Grimm" series, could hardly contain herself when she recognized Canis lupus as the Gray Wolf.

We voted to skip the planned experiment on ballast so Dad can participate with us in doing that tonight.

I expected much resistance to the grammar page, I asked them to pick out a proper noun, common noun, action verb, and pronoun from the text then make up their own story using those words. They hate putting pencil to paper, but got so caught up in creating their stories they forgot to complain. Eldest even put hers into comic strip format.

We finished off with a few math problems, and a discussion on what kind of person the boy who made Paddle-to-the-Sea must have been. A good time was had by all, and I finally feel like we're really getting involved with Holling's story, instead of skimming over it.

P.S. I found this great website that has full page text and illustrations of this beautiful book available for free online, as well as a 30 minute movie that was made to go with it. The movie differs from the book in many details, but has its own good points.