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.
