All Those Secrets of the World
I keep thinking I’m going to relax our school schedule a bit as we head into the final weeks before our baby arrives, mostly by taking a break from Five in a Row, but I just haven’t been able to do it. We already do way more “school” than necessary because I’m pretty much adding FIAR to an already complete program. The stories are just so great I can’t resist. We mostly row from the manual without a lot of extras, which is really all anyone needs to do anyway.
Last week we discovered a charming book, All Those Secrets of the World by Jane Yolen, from Five in a Row (Vol. 2). Each day we read the book and did a simple lesson from the manual. We talked a lot about perspective and how objects that are far away look small. (For a great lesson on this, check out “How Tall is it Really?” from Living and Learning at Home.) For our weekly art lesson, we painted pictures demonstrating this using watercolors, like most of the illustrations in the book. I demonstrated by painting a small tree up near the horizon of my picture and then a big tree on the other side of the paper. Ian liked the idea of making something look farther away and decided to do an ocean scene like the pictures in the book. However, after painting a small sailboat in the background and a large pirate ship in the foreground he got so into the details of the sharks surrounding the latter, the ship itself almost got lost. Still, he understood the concept, and he had a lot of fun doing the painting, so I considered it a great success.
(I’m so thankful the artist explained the details of the picture to me because I was somewhat at a loss as to interpreting it on my own!)
In the book Janie and her cousin aren’t supposed to swim in the water of the Chesapeake Bay because there’s a lot of oil. 
We talked about how oil and water don’t mix and watched a toy similar to this one. I found a list with some fun activities to explore this concept some more, but we didn’t get to any of them. We also talked about the effects of an oil spill in the ocean. He really liked this clip on YouTube about the Gulf oil spill. (We had to watch it several times.) I was hoping to find a way to watch the Go, Diego, Go episode “Ocean Animal Rescuer” which also discusses oil spills, but that season’s not streaming for free right now and I didn’t really want to purchase it without having previewed it.
So it was a pretty simple “row” but we had a great time with All Those Secrets of the World!
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.