Five In A Row with Lentil

Today was a day of sniffly tired people and cancelled plans with friends. In the end we had a really nice cosy at-home day, which is exactly what we needed.

One of the things we did today was to start our first Five In A Row (FIAR) book. Liam downloaded Lentil by Robert McCloskey off of Open Library for us and put it on my Kobo. The girls and I snuggled up on the couch and took a read through. It felt extremely odd to be reading a children's picture book off of a Kobo, especially when a few pages in things started looking like this:

And this:

Fortunately not all of the pages were funky, and we were able to read the book (although I did have to use my imagination a few times to decipher gobbledy gook).

In the end, it really did feel like something was missing by not having the physical book and the full-page pictures. We're going to try pulling the file up on a different device for upcoming days with Lentil, but after this book I know we'll be striving to work only with the books we can get paper copies of.

The book was enjoyable and Ollie, of course, had a string of questions about the story and the vocabulary as I read. When we finished the book I read a section from the FIAR text. The other day when I was mapping things out I'd flagged the section on the sense of taste because we have both lemons and dark chocolate in the house right now.

For each of the kids, I made up a plate with a lemon wedge, dark chocolate, salt, and sugar to exemplify the tastes of sour, bitter, salty, and sweet. They were most excited about the chocolate (because Mom doesn't usually share her hidden stash) and enjoyed going back and forth between the flavours. 

Ollie definitely learned the vocabulary word "pucker".

Once they'd had a chance to go through each of the foods and exclaim such things as "Salt is salty!" (thanks, Lily), the kids started to mix and match. I think my personal favourite was when they were dunking their lemon wedges in the salt. Yum yum! Goofballs.

All in all, today was a nice intro to FIAR for us. It was a simple enough experience that I had an easy time adding it to a day where I wasn't feeling great. It also lent itself well to both Ollie who was in it from start to finish to the older kids who drifted in and out as they were interested. Hopefully we'll get an opportunity to get back into it tomorrow!