Pink and Say Study...

Today the boys and I re-read the book, "Pink and Say", this time really dissecting the book and identifying words the boys don't understand for our vocabulary words and pointing out questions we have that we want to research further. This was a very interesting exercise that I've never done before with a book...it lead to great discussion and lots of further activities that we can now learn about together.

Some of our vocabulary words we took for the book were: lad, lodged, mahogany, marauder, colored, outfits**, dysentery, vittles, smote, spectacles, inconsolable, knapsack.

**As we were reading the story, Pink is talking about getting back to their "outfits". Ethan was confused, because their outfits were lying on the foot of their beds. We had a good chuckle over the english language and the multiple meanings one word can have.

We also pulled many questions from the book that we wanted to learn more about. Here were some of our questions:
Which states comprised the north, and which were from the south?
What does "Union colors" mean? What about confederate colors?
What was the 48th Colored Brigade?
What does "pound these clothes of yours" mean?
What does "jump the broom on this spot" mean?
Why did Say "carry a staff" instead of a gun?
Why are the belts and insignias on their hats/uniforms different?
How did the war end?

Today we printed out a blank copy of the USA and looked at the above map to color for ourselves the states and who belonged to the north and south! We also colored pictures of both sides in uniform.