Week Five Wrap-Up

The weather is cooler this week now that fall is finally decided to show up. We still have some green leaves on the trees making for some lovely shade in our garden which I adore. Before it gets too cold I still plan more outdoor dinners and time to take naps on the trampoline...makes for a great hammock!

We are just about finished reading The Blessed Child by Ted Dekkar and Bill Bright. It will be sad to end yet another heartwarming story to move on to the next one. We all have enjoyed this glimpse into God's miraculous nature that The Blessed child has revealed.

We are also completing our memorization of skip count song X6 about the monkey's in the jungle and will be learning X7 next week. I have been implementing more living math methods in our approach towards multiplication. So now that we have arrived at the X6 tables I am slowing down on how much new stuff I am presenting them to be sure they are really understanding the why of the table.

“The child may learn the multiplication-table and do a subtraction sum without any insight into the rationale of either. He may even become a good arithmetician, applying rules aptly, without seeing the reason of them; but arithmetic becomes an elementary mathematical training only in so far as the reason why of every process is clear to the child. 2+2=4, is a self-evident fact, admitting of little demonstration; but 4x7=28 may be proved." (Vol. 1 pp. 255, 256) 

So next week I'll explain how we did this. In the handbook Mathematics: An Instrument for Living Teaching gives some guide lines:

“To help the children to see the rationale of the multiplication table, they at first construct each one for themselves with the teacher’s assistance, e.g., suppose it were 4 times, the teacher begins ‘I write down one 4 on the board with a small 1 above it, to show how many fours I have. Then I write down another four, how many have I?’ ‘Two.’ ‘How much have I now, two fours that is?’ ‘Eight.’ Put eight down underneath the second 4. Now write down another four, we have three fours or 12, similarly four fours or 16, five fours or 20, and so on to the end of the table, 12 fours or 48, until the whole table stands: 

(Stephens, 1911, p. 10). 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

equals
4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48

They will see ( I trust) how the skip counting helps with the table and how multiplication is a simple way to do addition.

Much of my time this week has been spent preparing a lapbook centered around The Iliad by Homer. We have been reading Rosemary Sutcliff's version (Black ships Before Troy) of this epic poem which is actually written in a narrative form. On our next pass through this fascinating portion of history we will read the poem written by Homer.

To prepare the lapbook I print off the pages, cut them out and assemble parts that would be time consuming and irrelevant to the point of the book. Some things by doing them the boys will learn more about the story, other things are just busy work, I save them that. So once the mini books are ready I put them into a plastic pouch and save them for the boys. This time I fashioned the lap book to fit into our spiral bound scrapbook.

Just a glimpse of the mini books all out of the pocket.

The boys spent time coloring the pieces that made up the two front covers before we pasted them onto the cover and then into the spiral bound book. We limited the colors used to just browns and yellows to see how the colors will tie the whole lapbook together visually. This was an unpopular suggestion on my part and though the boys did it, they asked that they could decide on the colors next time. So though it looks great this way it is theirs and next time you will see the colors they choose.

Here is Zak's completed covers pasted in the notebook. We now have a lapbook in a note book. I am not sure if we are lapbooking or notebooking but probably the former rather than the latter. Either way it is working rather well. :)

We did put the mini books together and into place, but we have not yet written in them, colored them or done any sort of real study using them. In the end we will have understood better who killed who, who fought with the Trojans and who fought with the Greeks. We will know the family tree of the Greek gods and which gods played a part in this story. And last put the story on the map.

More entries made this week in the Aesop copywork book. Zak really caught onto this assignment and though I require only one fable a day he has been doing two or three hoping to get more and more treats for good handwriting. Very cute!

The boys are all sad that the Burgess Bird Book is drawing to a close. They are counting the pages that are left and savoring them. I suggested we read the book again, for there are so many things you can do to compliment this book and dig a little deeper into the information he so wonderfully presents about birds. I am strongly considering this but have not yet decided. What would you do? The boys were intrigued. I mean really, who said you can only read a book once? And then there are the issues brought up in my mind regarding illustrations and CM's methods. I like this quote from this article and am pondering just what part adding more to the reading of the story will play in their minds.

Our senses, it seems to me, are some of the tools we have for taking in information, but they are not the primary tools for learning.  This is a major problem in much of the world of education today.  There is much talk about learning styles, and I suppose it is helpful to know one’s learning style, but the fact is, taking information in is not the same as processing that information, or, as Mason said, “labouring with the mind.”   This is the step that many children never get to take in their learning process.  This is the purpose of narration, which Mason called “the act of knowing” (p. 17).  In fact, we may have preferences as to which sense we prefer to take in information (visually, kinesthetically, aurally, tactically, or odoriferously), but this is not the same as owning new information.  Mason says, “We trust much to pictures, lantern slides, cinematograph displays; but without labour there is no profit.” 

I'll tell you what I came up with next week. 

Another thing we completed this week: Memorized the Poem "A Secret." We did it the same we memorized the first poem, with drawing pictures, copywork and lots of reading and repetition. Now we are off to do some dictation the boy's favorite exercises. No really, it is!

We are getting to the end of Toad Triumphant too. This week seemed to be a week of many endings.  Thus I am soooo excited for next week which will be full of beginnings. :)

We veered away from the dialogues this week to look into the grammar of Latin. It was just a peek. I printed off cards with nouns (animals), cards with adjectives. The first day we simply played concentration with the animals to learn their names in latin.

On the second day we together matched the adjectives with the animals according to their gender. SImply collectively making up funny sentences with just the nouns and adjectives.

Then on the third day I hand printed two cards for each with the verbs we know thus far, erit (will be) and est (is). They first took the pile of adjectives and separated the masculine ones from the feminine ones, then I gave them each an animal and they created sentences matching the gender of the noun with the gender of the adjective. Then they read out their sentence in Latin and translated it to us using the words to help sheet below.

The cards for the animals and the adjectives were from the Minimus Teacher's guide, but the Words to Help sheet I made myself in Publisher.

To enhance the Klee inspired 3-D cities we painted last week we added some black lines, wow, they look so much better. These are Max's paintings.

Mostly this week we have been working on drawing and coloring 'inchies.' of Paul Klee's art works. Each square is 2 inches by 2 inches. We plan to make twelve in all and so far the boys have made 6 each, so we are halfway there.

Last week we finished reading A Day with Tchaikovsky so this week we listened to Tchiakovsky Comes to America a production by Classical Kids. Now onto a long look at the NutCracker Ballet. The boys will love this!

Lastly this week we went indoors to add an entry into our nature notebooks. Is wasn't because the weather was bad, but that it seemed a good time to add in a little skill training to our nature observation. We used basic contour drawings to develop the eye and train the coordination between what you see and what you draw. 

We did go out to get something to draw and then we drew the contour or outside edges of the specimen we selected. Then on another sheet of paper we tried a blind contour drawing looking only at the specimen and not at our papers. I did it first to show them how silly it will look and so they would not be afraid to just give it a go. This technique develops the best hand eye coordination needed for drawing. It was hilarious, fun and relaxed us all. Then they drew their specimen having had a good look at it now adding in as many details as we could see.

Hope your week was a good one too!

Every Day Life In Ancient Egypt Pocket

Our unit on every day life in Ancient Egypt though short was a lot of fun. I read aloud from:

Boy of the Pyramids, and Our Little Egyptian Cousin while they colored the following every day images and wrote about some of the everday events on the handwriting papers.

The every day things make a nice colorful pocket.

For this unit I ordered Ellen McHenry's Mapping the World with Art curriculum instead of doing a map drill. The map drawing curriculum includes maps for the whole globe and done in such a simple straight forward way the boys used only a pencil and eraser and a pen to make these  wonderful maps of egypt.

The boys also made these colorful costumes and dressed up as egyptians.

Max the greatest!

Zak and TJ the dancing egyptian boys.

Sand Dough Maps

As promised, by me to the boys, we made sand dough maps of Egypt after doing the map flip book. When we did the flip book the upside down terminology became apparent to the boys and they were confused by upper Egypt being in the south and lower Egypt being in the north. By making the sand dough map we were able to see that up, and down meant elevation not north and south. And that the rains fell upon the mountains in the south and flowed into the Nile river and down towards the Mediterranean sea.

 Before doing this project I was only familiar with salt dough maps, but I found a recipe for making sand dough which I thought would make the sand desert on our maps more realistic. The sand we used was fine and dark, it would be fun to use a coarser sand that is lighter in color. The dough comes out more rubbery than usual salt dough but it worked fine for our maps.

Once we had the sand dough made, we smooshed the dough onto the cardboard using the print out of a topographical map of Egypt to guide us. The dough has glue in it so it dried very quickly we had to work fast to stay ahead of the drying.

Zak is making a last minute check of the map before he finishes his map.

It took a day or so for the map to dry. Once it was dry we painted it. TJ has just mixed a nice brown for the sand. Once he finishes that it will dry before we add the green parts just on the edge of the Nile River.

Waaala! The project is finished. TJ's map is on the left followed by Zak's map and finally Max's map.

Glorified Map Drill

Last week we skipped doing map drill due to important interruptions. However that led us to something even better this week. In an attempt to save the map drill lesson I ended up incorporating it into a project we were doing with some info from our reading this week We are reading from The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt. In the end we came up with a cool looking map flip book.

The info we needed to incorporate into some form of project was this:

• The three kingdoms of Ancient Egypt: upper, middle and lower Egypt. (we also included Nubia for fun)

• The names of the three kings: The hawk king, The reed, king and the bee king.

• The hats worn by the three different kings: The red hat for the lower kingdom, the white hat for the middle kingdom and the two hats in one for the upper which dominated and became the hat of the two lands.

• Lastly the items on our map from map drill. We got carried away and added all four cataracts, and the Mediterranean sea. We usually only add one item each week. But why not add more, it was fun!

I put together the flip book on my own ahead of time just to get my own mind around the lesson. But when I introduced the lesson I gave the boys only the info. We then discussed how we could somehow turn that info into a project. We discussed different things we could do to explain or show this information visually. The lesson flopped a bit because they were not as enthusiastic about the info from our book as I was, which made them less enthusiastic about doing a project with it. This often happens in life. Each person in reading a passage from any good book will get different things out of the passage depending on who they are, what they already know etc. So, even though they were not excited like I was by the info when we read it, I thought it was still a worth while endeavor to continue on with a project idea. By doing this they are getting a chance to see how it can be done and will most likely begin thinking of their own projects as we read along in our book of the pharaohs and I will be waiting in the wings, ready to see that project come to life. In the future I am hoping and praying to see their ideas, not mine made into projects. But for now I don't mind teaching them to dance by letting them stand upon my shoes. So we danced to my footsteps this time and it turned out quite nice. The bys did an great job, and learned more about the three kings, the lay of the land according to the kingdoms and what was really a new idea for them was that lower Egypt was at the top of our map. I hope in the future, to do a salt dough map of Egypt so they can see why the lower Egypt is really lower and upper Egypt is really upper due to the muntains in Nubia.

In the end after talking about the info and the project ideas, they liked my idea best. So we embarked on the adventure of making it.

• First we cut covers to match the maps. Then we decorated the cover with an old style map and the title.

• Next we cut the bottoms off three of the four maps we had. One map was for lower Egypt, one for middle Egypt, one for upper Egypt and one for Nubia. This is the same map we use for our map drill so we already know it quite well. Each map was printed on a different color paper so it would be easy to see where one kingdom stopped and another began.
• Next we stapled all the maps and the cover together so the map tiers would fall into the correct position.
• Next we colored and cut out the three kings and placed them on the correct kingdom where they were known to have ruled.
• and lastly we did our map drill and added features to the map(s) and colored it in.
  
  

  

  Max's map, Zak's map and T.J.'s map in that order.
    

This Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt map flip book can be downloaded here for free. Enjoy!

Solar System Map Drill

We do map drills in our study of Egypt and now in our study of the solar system as well. I just created this freebie so drop by a pick up a copy if you want to try it too. This is a simple and easy way to learn the planets and their order around the sun. here is how to begin…

1. First lesson: add one planet (the sun) to the blank map.

2. Second lesson: (one week later) without looking at the map with planets put the planet on the blank map you added last week (the sun). Then add another planet to the blank map. (mercury).

3. Third lesson: (one week later) without looking at the map with the planets put the two planets on the blank map that you added last week. (the sun and mercury). Then add another planet to the blank map.

4. Fourth lesson: (one week later) repeat the last lesson and add another planet to the blank map.

On and on you go until all the planets have been added.

Enjoy!