Nim's Island Activities - Chapter 1

~ The Tropics ~

We have been looking forward to the Currclick live class about Nim's Island for quite a while now.  Unfortunately, the first posting is later than I expected, so we decided to "wing-it" on our own this week.  I poked around the internet (finding a few other class members in the process) and decided that we would focus on our studies the Tropical climate.

I pulled this map of the tropics, along with this one which shows the current weather, and we discussed where the tropics are, what kind of weather they have and why, and had a long discussion about hurricanes.  I got a lot of background information from Laura's unit over at HomeschoolShare.  The highlight was watching Sara's weather reports on youtube - a young meteorologist in the making.  

Afterwards we traced one of the girls and the kids used the first two paragraphs of the book to make a large poster of Nim, complete with lots of wild hair, bright eyes, and the three cords around her neck (I couldn't find my velcro, so the spyglass etc will be stuck on later).  We then talked about what kind of clothing we thought Nim should wear - short sleeves to keep her cool, boots to protect her from the rough rocks of the "fiery mountain" etc.  They had a lot of fun with this one, and I am sure we will add to our picture as we go along.

The kids were each given three necklaces like Nim's.  One with a spyglass (paper tube), another for the knife and sheath (laminated photos from google images), and a whistling shell (plastic whistle with a seashell sticker).   They were told that these are their SPECIAL cords, and that they can wear them only when we are reading the book.  Whenever Nim uses one of the items on their cords they will be able to act it out with her.    We spent a lot of time spying pirate ships through our spyglasses and whistling for help :-)

Our final activity was to color a map of Nim's Island.  We talked about compasses and how on this particular map North was not at the top.   The kids had fun pointing out the tiny animals and coloring certain areas of the map really dark to "hide" Nim.  

This is going to be a fun unit!