Harold and the Purple Crayon
Over the last couple weeks (sickness and weather dragged it out a lot longer than I intended), we’ve been “rowing” Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson. Many of the activities in the Five in a Row (Vol. 2) manual were geared toward slightly older children, so I’m sure we’ll enjoy rowing it again later on. We kept it simple and had a lot of fun!
As with all our school books, I made Ian wait until Monday morning before I would read it to him. He’d seen me get the book out on Saturday and was itching to get going. We read the story many, many times over the course of three weeks, as well as enjoying Harold and the Purple Crayon: Let Your imagination Soar on video (which I found at the 99-cent Store a couple years ago and have been saving for our Five in a Row time. (Both boys loved it and requested it repeatedly.) We also watched a Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood segment on how crayons are made, which Ian found fascinating.
We took out all the purple crayons and markers we could find to compare the different shades of “purple”. Then we each took one purple crayon and drew a picture. This is one area where I feel like we should be spending more time. Ian never “draws”; he just scribbles color and doesn’t even attempt to make it look like anything. So I was very intentional about drawing a real scene. He attempted to copy me all on his own. He was worried that it didn’t look like mine, but I tried to reassure him that the point of art is making something that is unique. And actually, I thought his picture turned out pretty well considering what I’m used to seeing out of him. I think we’ll start being more intentional about “art lessons,” since he does really seem to enjoy it (and Elijah is really into it).
The highlight of our time with Harold, however, was the lesson on “Gaining a View from Altitude” (FIAR (Vol. 2), pg. 152). We live up in the hills, so we are fortunate to be able to look down upon the “flatlands” below and see places we go on a regular basis. (Target’s big red sign is an easy landmark for us to find.) But we were able to take this idea even further with an awesome field trip that only cost us the gas to get there. In the book Harold tried to figure out where he was by climbing a mountain, and he ended up coming down in a balloon that looked a lot like this one.
Orange County Great Park has a helium balloon that can take passengers 400 feet up in the air.
We loved looking down and seeing the parking lot, the carousel, the playground, the freeway, etc. What a view!
It was a fun way to finish off our time with Harold!
To see what other FIAR books we’ve rowed, see my “Index of FIAR Posts.” Also, a great place to see what other people have done with FIAR books is the FIAR Blog Roll at Delightful Learning.