Five in a Row book 3

The book this week was Grandfather's Journey by Allen Say. It's about a Japanese man who comes to the US and travels a lot, then settles in San Francisco. He eventually goes back to Japan and is never able to return to California because of World War II even though he misses it. Eventually, his grandson, also born in Japan, goes to California and understands his grandfather's split allegiance between Japan and California - when he's in one, he misses the other.

Monday: No regular schedule because of Memorial Day. So we seem to be setting a pattern of reading a book 4 times instead of 5, because of sick days the other 2 weeks. Oh well. We're still reading it multiple times and picking out different things.

Tuesday: First read-through. We looked on our globe for Japan, the US, and the Pacific Ocean.

Wednesday: We read it again but the girls aren't latching onto this book like they did with the other two. No extra activity.

Thursday: One page says that the grandfather, in his travels, shook hands with "black men, white men, yellow men, and red men." Sunny asked about "yellow" people and I said that sometimes people from Asia are referred to as having yellow-colored skin. We talked about various skin colors and the people we know of different races. I associated it with where our ancestors are from - our skin is white because our ancestors came from a part of the world called Europe. Sister B at church has very dark skin, called black, because her ancestors came from Africa. Sister P's skin is brown because her ancestors came from Latin America. I had a flashback to a section of the book Nurtureshock which contends that white parents typically avoid conversations about race because it can be such an uncomfortable subject. I don't know how well I did by those authors' standard, but when I got a question from a 5-year-old, I tried to explain it at her level and didn't just avoid it.

Again, the girls aren't really latching onto this book like they have with others ... but that was probably the best educational conversation we've had so far in all 3 weeks.

Friday: Just a quick read-through but no one was paying attention. We moved on to other things.