FIAR Co-op - Lentil - Part 1

For the past two weeks our co-op has read and done activities from the book Lentil, by Robert McCloskey. I love anything by Robert McCloskey! He's one of my favorite childrens authors, so this was a fun book for me to teach.


After reading the book together we talked about the town and looked specifically at ways in which the town of Alto, Ohio (fictional) was different than the towns we live in today. Then we constructed the town out of duplos! Each of the children worked on a different part and then we put them together.


Here is the barbershop, complete with the barber's sign out front.


After building the town and acting out parts of the story, we turned our attention to the different tastes our tongue can taste. A lemon, and its effect on band members trying to play their instruments, is central to the plot in Lentil. So we talked about taste buds. We looked at our tongues in mirrors to see all the little bumps on them. The bumps are not the taste buds, each bump (called papillae) has several hundred taste buds in it!



Then we tasted items from the four taste groups: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. For "sweet" we drank sugar water. Everyone really liked that one! (I loaded the water with lots of sugar so there would be no doubt!)

Next we ate saltine crackers for the salty taste.

We ate lemons for the sour taste. Most of the children loved the taste of lemon and it did not cause their lips to pucker like it did to people in the story!



We had fun practicing puckers anyway. This little guy was our winner with the best pucker!



Lastly we chewed on banana peels to taste the bitter flavor. Have you ever chewed on a banana peel? Ewwwwww. Have something else handy to get the taste out of your mouth as quickly as possible!


We then made tongue and taste pictures for our FIAR notebooks.





It was another fun day at co-op!