Wednesday, February 29, 2012

A Cool Bug Singing OurStory and Metaphors

... and the importance of commas.

Look at this groovy little dude we discovered on Sunday.
We were upstairs when we heard Lu start yelling at the top of lungs
-
"Bring the camera RIGHT NOW! Hurry. HURRYyyyyy!!!"

After last week's semi-break (half days),
we're back to our full-day schedule.

We've been singing almost every day, and our repertoire is growing.

Today we sang them all:
(with links to lyrics)

Lean on Me - Bill Withers
Stand By Me - Ben E. King
Imagine - John Lennon
War - Bob Marley
El Rin del Angelito - Violeta Parra (Chile)Ojalá - Silvio Rodriguez (Cuba)
Come Together - The Beatles
Todo Cambia - Mercedes Sosa (Chile)

- - - - - - - -

We've also been working on idioms,
metaphors, alliteration and similes.

Here are some examples that Lu wrote in his notebook:

Simile - Jackie Chan is as strong as a mountain.
Metaphor - My dad is a calculator in math.
Alliteration - Tom tripped and tipped the tea.

- - - - - - - - -

Here are some of our recent Vocabulary words -

Dynasty, Heritage, Inference, Boycott,
Stupefied, Cantankerous, Colossal, Distorted,
Strikes, Nowadays, Genuine, and Whirlwind

- - - - - - - -

On Monday we started World History.
I've been getting ready for months - reading, writing,
planning, looking for videos, preparing activities...

Our first class was 2.5 hours long! We loved it.

I started out explaining to Lu that I don't agree with calling it History, because it means His-Story. Lu has been well formed in gender equality from a very early age, so he immediately saw my point.

So what do you call it?

OurStory
. That's what I would call it.
I told him that this was probably the subject that I found most important of all, because it's the story about us and where we come from - the story of all children, women, and men. He was literally bouncing with excitement at the thought of learning how all of this (the world we live in) happened.

The curriculum I put together starts with prehistoric human, but we ended up going back 13 billion years or so earlier to first talk about how it is that the Earth came to be. We watched several Birth of the Universe videos (on YouTube), and found some cute animations done by kids like this one.

It's so vast - all that time before humans. But right now, I just want Lu to have a general idea of how little time we've been here compared to how long Earth has existed, which in turn is relatively little compared to how long the Universe has existed. My head starts spinning if I think about it too much.

How is it possible that teachers didn't manage to get my interest in all of this when I was a child? It's so fascinating. When Cha got home, Lu told him all about it. I love when he's so excited about what we're learning. I'm excited too.

Timelines are going to be an important part of our studies in OurStory which, for the sake of readers who don't read this post, I will be calling History (so lame and lazy, I know). I had Lu do this Phanerozoic Eon Table, just to become familiarized with the names, but I doubt we'll spend much time on them, not this year anyway.


OK. Gotta go get ready for some Radiocarbon Dating.
Hope you're having a good week!

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