FIAR: Very Last First Time

Our latest FIAR book was Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews. It's the story of an Inuit girl named Eva who goes searching for mussels at low tide under the sea ice in the winter in Canada. It was a great book and the kids loved the idea of being able to walk around under the ice. 

 We did an experiment to show what tides do. First we put rocks and a couple of animals (ok... dinosaurs) on the rocks. Then we filled the water a little bit (low tide) and the boys could see how they could still easily move across the rocks without getting wet.

 Then we poured more water in (high tide) making it so most of the rocks were now under water and so trapped the animals on the rocks where they were. 

 Rebecca picked up a bag of mussels from the store one evening and we let the kids see how they opened up when you put then in water. 

The artwork in the point has a lot of pointillist style, so we tried an art project we saw on someone else's page where they used spiky rings to paint with, creating a sort-of-pointillist effect.

We also read a couple of other books: Arctic Son (which our library thankfully had, since it's out of print) and The Three Snow Bears. We talked some about polar bears and how they have a thick (up to 6 inches!) layer of fat and how they can swim in the icy arctic waters. 

To illustrate how that works, Gabe and Ezra stuck their hands in ice water and held them there for a minute. 

Then we made a "glove" out of two ziploc bags with shortening in between them. They stuck their hands back in with the gloves on and didn't get cold at all!

Irene thought that was way cool, so she wanted to try it, too. :)

This was a really fun and interesting unit study for all of us.