Watercraft of the World, week three

Our form drawing right now is focused on completing a picture.  So I drew this on the board (and on Dallin's paper) and he had to draw the other half.

The bottom half of this page shows Dallin's completion of the form.  The top half is the one we did the week before (same concept).  I think he does so well at this!

I think this week's story was the most fascinating of all! Our skill was multiplication, and our subject was the Portuguese Dory. Marsha Johnson's files said to focus on the medieval cod-fishing boats from Portugal that fished in the Atlantic off the coast of New England. But like others, I could not find out much information about these, so I went the route of the Innate Way blog and focused on the 20th century dorymen. She has a link to a great video of these fishermen. What an incredible story! I lay awake at night for several days thinking about these amazing men! They were gone six months of the year fishing for cod in extremely dangerous conditions, including icy water, choppy waves, and thick fog. They often fished alone in their small dories up to 10 miles way from their "mother ship" and then had to find their way back home at the end of the day, sometimes in terrible fog. Many fishermen lost their lives over the years. They worked 12 hours as day fishing, then another six hours cleaning and processing the fish onboard the ship.

Dallin's drawing of a lonely fisherman in his dory, with the big, ugly cod.

I found this silly poem on the internet, and we recited it for several days:

The codfish lays ten thousand eggs
The homely hen lays one
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she's done
And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize
Which only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise.

We also baked some cod one night for dinner.  I felt guilty buying any after learning about how cod has been overfished so much that there are now hardly any left in the Atlantic Ocean.

Practicing multiplication (and division) with manipulatives.  Dallin still gets confused about the concepts, so this hands-on experience is good for him.

He has now learned all 12 times tables, so we've been reviewing.  This day, I wrote the products for three different tables, mixed them up, and he had to sort the numbers into which tables they went.  I didn't tell him which tables they were, so he had to figure that out too.  He loved this activity!  We did similar things with the other nine tables.

Really nice clock Dallin made for the 12's table.

And our classroom wall, showing our multiplication clocks andother artwork.

Chart Dallin made for all the times tables.

For our field trip we went to Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake.  It's the nearest we could get to the ocean.  We've lived here seven years, and we'd never been there.  Dallin had been asking to go for months.  We had such a wonderful time, it was the perfect outing!  This time I didn't brave it by myself; Grandma came with us.

The view.

Dallin and Sariah running down the beach toward the water.

The kids made sailboats this week for our art project, and we couldn't wait to put them in the water and see if they would actually sail.  Sariah's did right off the bat, Dallin's not so much.

Dallin dejectedly watching Sariah's boat float.

But at the last minute, Dallin's little vessel did it!  Just as he was about to give up forever.  Dallin would not go in the water and talked Sariah into doing all the wet work for him.  She's the one who got it to float.

The view walking back up the beach.

Dallin's one goal for the day was to see the bison herd that lives on the island, and he got his wish.  I probably let him get a bit too close to the animals to get pictures (though this was taken with a telephoto lens, no I was not dumb enough to let him get that close!)   He also got to see an antelope.

Beautiful view looking north across the lake towards the valley where we live.

Grandma took great care of Preston!

This has nothing to do with homeschool, but I couldn't resist including this picture of Dallin performing at his piano recital a few weeks ago.  I'm so pleased with how he's progressing at the piano!  Even though he periodically has to remind me that he dislikes it (I think he's feeding me a line!), he is very self-motivated in his practicing, and has a great knack for rhythm and memorization.