Five in a Row Volume 3 ~ The Salamander Room
The Salamander Room was a great row. We loved the topics that went along with this whimsical storybook about a boy who imagines his room turns into the perfect Salamander habitat. We really embraced LOTS and LOTS of Nature Study for the two weeks we did this unit.
Here are just some of the topics we covered with our row of The Salamander Room:
- Language Arts – list making, story setting, parallel construction (see the activity at the bottom of the post), Reading for Knowledge (ie: how to research), copywork, narration
- Art – a review of various concepts (shadows, viewpoint, color palette, personification, etc.), creating Salt-dough Salamanders and decorating/painting our own Salamander Room, we also discussed the use of space and practiced drawing dew drops
- Science – We infused tons of Nature Study to inspire a deeper love of nature (as part of the theme). We looked at butterflies, amphibians, turtles, and did a Nature Scavenger Hunt. We took a nature walk at dusk to search for Salamanders, and enjoyed a sunset canoe trip. We also discussed Animal Classification (see the game posted below), anatomy and life cycles of Salamanders, Crickets, Butterflies, among other things!
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Some of the books we enjoyed along with our row of The Salamander Room |
Studying and Seeking Butterflies!
Classification Game
Here’s what you do:
Making Salt-dough Salamanders and Creating a Salamander Room:
We used a
I found through another FIAR blogger to create easy (and super fun!) Salt-dough Salamanders. This was a challenging craft as Salamanders aren’t the easiest little creatures to mimic in shape and proportion. It took some time and patience, but we did it!The entire project of making the Salt-dough Salamanders, baking them, painting them, and then creating our own Salamander Room out of a cardboard box took about 3 days total. It was worth it though!
Nature Walk – looking for Salamanders at Dusk
Loving Nature – Canoe Trip!
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These beautiful Swans came and swam along side our canoe! |
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And… a rare selfie of my husband and I… *smile* |
Amphibians – Toads!
Other Activities:
A fun and easy Nature Scavenger Hunt –
An activity to go with the Language Arts discussion of Parallel Construction:
The story of The Salamander Room uses a sort of parallel construction in the conversation between mother and son. We used a scale and pebbles to show the parallel construction as they spoke to one another.Each time the boy asked a question, we put a pebble on the scale. Every time the Mom answered, we did the same on the other side of the scale.
Notebooking and Lapbooking:
A Few Links:
For notebooking, I used several pages from my membership at NotebookingPages.com.
Free Lapbook from Homeschool Share
Free Animal Classification print-outs
Recipe and more examples of awesome clay Salamanders
As always, thanks for reading!
3 Comments
Megan Russell
I love that scavenger hunt idea. Also, those salt-dough salamanders look amazing!!
Unknown
Wonderful as usual 🙂 Pinning for when we get to this book.
Alisha
This post was PERFECT timing! My husband found a salamander this week and my daughter played with it for the whole day! We were able to "run with" the learning of salamanders from that! Our fellow homeschooling friends let us borrow "The Salamander Room" book and we read that a couple days ago. Then we drew and painted one in our nature journals and learned information about them. I saw this post this morning, and we made the salt dough salamanders this afternoon! My daughter was so excited. Thanks for sharing!