Very Last First Time

The book we're doing for FIAR this week is Very Last First Time by Jan Andrews.  It is a book about a girl who harvests mussels from under the ice by herself for the first time.

We explored pointillism.  I cut out some images from one of her colouring books and we used cotton swabs to make the dots.

In addition to playing out the story in our basement, she did more traditional things. She watched the Magic School Bus episode on mussels...several times.  She worked on writing her numbers and lowercase letters.

We took a "field trip" and grabbed the Go train to Union Station.  We went to the St. Lawrence market and purchased mussels.

We cooked the mussels using Jaime Oliver's recipe.  It uses smoked bacon, hard cider and crème fraîche.

She wasn't too sure about eating them.  She did manage to taste one, but then opted for the garlic bread.

We also recently did colour mixing experiments.  We filled clear plastic containers with water and then Rachel mixed various food colours.  As with all good science experiments, we learned from it not doing what we thought it would.  Our hope was for coloured blocks of ice we could play with in the yard.  However, we learned that food colouring (at least the kind you buy in our grocery store), contains propylene glycol. Then never totally froze.

I threw out the rest of the food colouring.

We also had a deer recently that came to eat bird seed on a daily basis.  We watched it through the front window.