The good thing about being in two school districts is having two spring breaks at two different times. Our parent partnership program took its break two weeks ago. We kept on learning, but at a slower pace. The local school district is on break now, so our public schooled friends are available for play this week! Ian has been very busy with his friends, so we are learning at a slower pace again.
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| "You think this is bad, you should have seen what I did in the bathroom last night!" |
Shane is learning about mean, median, mode, and range in math. He was really struggling with the way the material was presented in his math book, so I created "cookie math" to remedy the situation. I bought a big box of assorted cookies in single sized packs at Costco yesterday. Today I had each of my kids, plus Ian's friend, pretend they were a scientist from a different country. They had to announce their field of expertise and what country they originated from. We had biologists, a mathematician, a herpetologist, and an anthropologist. Even Daniel participated! He said he was a "ball" scientist from God's country. We called him a physicist from Israel. Shane had to type the name of the country into a spreadsheet in Excel. Every "scientist" received a bag of cookies, counted the number of cookies, reported their data to Shane for entry, and consumed said cookies. Shane will be responsible for calculating the numbers later.
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| "Look, Mom. Six is three twos!" |
Spring also means the kids are outside when the sun shines. I remind myself that workbooks are for rainy days and sunny days are for exploring. I let Evie take the camera outside so she could take pictures of birds. The camera is my most important tool, so I have a hard time sharing it. But Evie has an artistic eye and a love for nature (so much like Ami), so I take a deep breath and let her go. She always comes back with a memory card full of blurry bug/flower/dog/chicken pictures and movies that make even the most steady person motion sick. But this little video is a gem (it is her first attempt at a nature documentary): oh, and ignore the groaning in the background. It was just Fiona expressing her boredom in the most passive aggressive manner...
Can you tell the kids have been watching a lot of nature shows on the National Geographic website?
