Five in a Row: Grandfather's Journey

Over the last two weeks we studied two books that take place in Japan: 

Grandfather's Journey and A Pair of Red Clogs. 

Both are excellent stories that D loved to read over and over - and I did too!  That is the mark of a truly good children's story!  Books that my husband and I don't like reading have a tendency to disappear from the house...

We cooked a lot of Japanese food and did a lot of cultural activities between the two books.  

D can easily pick out Japan on a map now.  and trace different ocean routes for travelling to Japan from the United States, thanks to another really wonderful Japanese story we read.  

Here are some of the activities we did as we rowed through Japan!

Grandfather's Journey:

Geography:  We found Japan on our world map and colored it in, and printed a Japanese flag to color.

Grandfather's Journey offered a great introduction to land forms.  Grandfather traveled from Japan, across the ocean and through the American West.  The illustrations show cliffs, the seacoast, plains, rock formations, mountains, valleys, and rivers.  We printed pictures of different landforms for D to color and label and made a land forms book.  He was really into making his pictures realistic and added rocks, trees, bushes and flowers to the scenes.  We also had the chance to talk about how Japan is a series of volcanic islands.  We watched a Discovery video on volcanoes.  We also found a documentary online about how the seacoast is formed and changed by the pressures of the ocean crashing against it.       

Culture: We talked about Japanese music, clothing, and house architecture.  We noticed in the book illustrations how the characters switch back and forth between Western and Japanese clothing as Grandfather and his family traveled.   

 

We cooked Japanese soup and had sushi one afternoon for lunch sitting round our coffee table on cushions, like they showed in the book. We used fresh greens from our garden and fresh quail eggs from our birds.  Neither of my kids really liked the soup or the sushi (more for me!) but they did both try.  While we ate we watched several performances of traditional Japanese dance we found on Youtube. 

 

Social studies: This book was a great start to our transportation board.  Throughout our Kindergarten year we will print and color pictures of the different modes of transportation used in the books and add them to our board.  From Grandfather's Journey we added an old fashioned steamship, a train, and a river steamboat. (we also put on a river row boat like the ones we saw in "Ping")

We created a family tree and talked about the meaning of the word "generation."  The story takes us through three generations: grandfather, his daughter, and his grandson, who is the narrator of the story.  I printed pictures of some of our family members (from off of Facebook), which were not very good quality at all, but it was still a really fun project!  We wrote in other names.  Then added a bunch of different leaves to make it attractive.  It's up on our fridge now!