Lentil: Harmonicas, Lemons, and Charcoal Pencils

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Lentil, published in 1940, is a classic picture book by multi-awarded author-illustrator Robert McCloskey. Lentil is a young boy who decides to become an expert at playing the harmonica after realizing that he can’t sing, or even whistle! His harmonica-playing leads him to become the town hero when the town band fails to welcome a very important person at the train station.

The Five in a Row manual is sooo rich in material that we can go as light or as deep as we want to. I am trying to slow down a bit because Little T is just four, so I chose the easier topics from the wonderful manual. We will definitely row this book again! Here’s a peek at the fun we had…

MUSIC Music was a natural choice because we just love music around here! After looking at the drawing of the different instruments that the town band members are holding in the book, we got our own and talked about the four instrument families: percussion, string, woodwind, and brass.

Of course, we also played our harmonicas! The two that we have are part of Kindermusik’s Away We Go home materials. I tasked Little T to learn how to play Hey, Tswana using the activity guide (blow for a triangle, and suck for the inverted one) with the objective of playing from memory.

CHARCOAL PENCIL Robert McCloskey’s drawings in Lentil were done in charcoal. Five in a Row encourages experimentation with the material, so we bought ONE charcoal pencil at National Bookstore – just one because it costs 98 pesos! We drew, shaded, and smudged to get the same effect as the book illustrations. We also compared two boxes that we shaded with lead pencil and charcoal pencil.

TASTE The town band musicians fail to play their brass instruments because they see Old Sneep sucking on a lemon. (Now, doesn’t the mention of lemon make you sour-mouthed too?!) We experimented with different tastes and then made some lemonade. Little T got mad that I made her taste “bitter.”

MEMORIAL PARK Lentil passes by Carter Memorial Park while playing the harmonica on his way to school. So, we went to Quezon Memorial Park and looked at the shrine dedicated to President Manuel Quezon. We also made it a point to look at several monuments or statues in Makati City when we went there as Lentil also passes by a monument in the story. In all of those outings, we talked about how we remember and honor heroes in our history through monuments and statues. I love it that we were able to connect elements of this story with the books we just read: The Chair King (heroes) and The Red Carpet (welcoming important people).

WHITTLE The “villain” in the story, Old Sneep, grumbles and whittles wood all day. I wondered how I could show Little T what “whittle” means, and came upon the idea of carving soap – hello, or rather goodbye, Perla!