Lentil

Written and Illustrated by Robert McCloskey

Key Scripture: Romans 12:6a (NIV) "We have different gifts according to the grace given us."

With Lentil we learned about how God gives us different gifts and abilities and how it is important to use and develop the gifts He has given us, rather than to be jealous of the gifts that someone else has been given. Lentil's inability to sing or whistle caused him to develop his talent for playing the harmonica, and he was able to "save the day" because he has practiced his own unique gifting. Claire was able to relate Old Sneep's jealousy with that of the Babylonian wise men toward Daniel.

We placed our story disk on the state of Ohio and discussed the fact that Alto is a fictional town, but based upon the real town of Hamilton where Mr. McCloskey grew up. We greatly expanded our geography envelope system, making city/town envelopes for Alto/Hamilton, Brunswick (where Grandma & Grandpa Lathem live) and Cuyahoga Falls (where Uncle Don & Aunt Amy live).

We took a "virtual walking tour" of the historical district of Elgin, comparing it to the fictional town of Alto. The next day we actually went to our historical district and did an abbreviated version of this walking tour. We read the story in the gazebo in our downtown memorial park, saw the war memorial in the same park, saw both train depots, the barber shop, the pharmacy, the bank, and the mercantile. The train depots were definitely the kids' favorites. Later, as they played with their toy trains they were recreating the story - complete with Sneep on the roof of the depot. Claire even tried to make the entrance to Colonel Carter's house out of Lego's.

We played with toy harmonicas, then noticed how different the sound was when we used a real harmonica. This was even more evident with Grandpa Brauer played his harmonica for us when he and Grandma were visiting.

We talked about "setting" and "characters" and what those terms mean. As we read through the book, we made lists of the places mentioned (setting), the people mentioned (characters), and the musical instruments mentioned or pictured. We then counted the number of items in each list and compared the size of the lists.

We had company coming for dinner one night (longtime friends of LaNette) and so prepared some special "lemony" treats for them: lemon bars from the FIAR Cookbook and lemonade. As we cooked, we also talked about our taste buds and compared things that tasted sweet (sugar), salty (salt), sour (lemons), and bitter (vanilla). We also created special place cards for our dinner, incorporating items from the story (lemons, ice cream cones, harmonicas, and our scripture verse). One of the things that made this visit even more special was that one of our guests was a "real live colonel" - just like Colonel Carter. Our guests were wonderful in interacting with the kids about what they'd been learning. Later, they sent us a cookie bouquet with cookies shaped like - what else - lemons and ice cream cones! What a neat reminder of our time with this fun story and with them. The lady who delivered the bouquet said she just had to ask why they'd requested lemons - so we got to share this fun homeschool moment with someone else too! Here is a photo of that very special bouquet.