Five in a Row: Very Last First Time & Volcano fun

We just completed our FIAR "Very Last First Time." This is a charming and suspenseful story of a little Inuit girl from the Ungava bay area in Northern Canada. As part of Inuit tradition, she goes alone to collect mussels at the bottom of the sea, under the ice, when the tide goes out. We did a little research and found out this is something that the Inuit people still do. We found the above video about the dangers of mussel hunting.
Click here to find out more.
Here are some of the other activities we did in our row:
*Discussed Inuit culture and the Arctic region. We found Ungava bay on the world map. We went through the illustrations in the book and compared and contrasted Inuit culture to our own.
*We looked at the illustrations of the book, and identified that they were drawn using the method of pointillism (made up of hudreds of tiny dots of paint.) I had remembered Isaac's aunt Holly drawing a picture for art class using the same method, so I asked her to send me a picture of it so I could show Isaac.

*We talked about safety and crisis thinking. When Eva goes below the surface of the frozen ocean, her candles burn out, and she hears the tide coming back in. For a moment, she panics until she remembers what to do. We talked about the five steps to remember when in a crisis situation: (1) calm down, (2) don't panic, (3) be quiet, (4) think carefully! (5) ask: what am I supposed to do?
*We identified the following scientific terms and discussed their application to the story: Tides, Biome, Echo, Ocean Life and Sea Salt. We looked through some books with pictures of an arctic biome and an ocean biome.
For Road Trip USA, we are in the state of Washington. We talked at length about the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and of course, we had to make our own volcano. We've done this before, but we added a few elements this time. We made our volcano out of dirt. In the center, we placed a plastic cup holding baking soda, dish soap and food coloring. We added vinegar and let the explosion begin!
Before eruption

Mid-eruption

Full eruption!

We are winding down for the year! I estimate we will be done with all of our subjects by May 24th. Isaac and Graham have worked especially hard this year and I am SO proud of them!