Week two was subtraction and China! We learned about a ship called the Junk (pronounced Joong), and I told a story, set in medieval times, about the ship being inspected by the emperor prior to departing for the Spice Islands. Later in the week, I told two different Chinese legends,
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| Dallin's. |
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| One fun thing we did this week was to learn to write and count to 10 in Chinese. We practied all week, then wrote the characters on our drawings. |
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| We discussed the Spice Islands and what kinds of spices the sailors would have traded for. We drew small "jugs" on the sides of our boats, and in each jug, we glued a different spice: ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. It was suggested to also used cardamom, but when I went to the store and saw that cardamom was $15 bucks a jar, I decided to forego that one! Dallin decided that in order to have the full experience, he needed to actually taste each spice. I think he regretted that! |
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| We also made origami sailboats. Yes, I know origami is Japanese, but hey, it was still fun! |
For our daily language, we practiced tongue twisters and tried to solve some fun riddles. We worked alot on subtraction with borrowing. It was interesting to see that Dallin is not as up-to-speed on subtraction as he is on addition. He is not nearly as quick with being able to spout off subtraction facts under twenty, something which should eventually be second-nature. He also gets confused with multi-digit numbers and borrowing, Sometimes he borrows when there is no need for it. I really love this aspect of homeschooling--I feel like I have such a more intimate knowledge of exactly what he knows and doesn't know, and exactly where his strenghts and weaknesses lie! He was definitely not ready for subtracting four-digit numbers.
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| I got this idea from the Innate Way blog, and she adapted it from the book A Journey Through Waldorf Math by Melisa Nielsen. It is a combination of a mathematical drawing, a game, and problem-solving practice. First I drew the square, which represented a "map" of the Spice Islands. (I did this on the board, the picture above is what Dallin was drawing on his paper at the same time.) At the midpoint on each side of the square, we drew a dot that represented one of the islands. At each dot, before we drew the line to the next one, he had to solve a couple of word problems. Now we had a diamond. We did the same thing with the diamond--each midpoint represented something, I think in this case it was a place the sailors visited in the city they stopped at. At each point, he had to solve word problems related to the ongoing story. We continued this until we had the whole cool picture done. It was fun, and a really creative way to get some subtraction practice in! |
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| Another fun thing we did to practice subtraction was this game of Tidal Wave, based on the Mountain of Minus game we did earlier in the year, also from Marsha Johnson's files. Dallin and Sariah each colored and cut out a fish. Well, Dallin made his into a sea serpent, of course. We started at the top of the tidal wave with the number 999. I had Dallin roll three dice, and the three numbers he rolled became the digits of the number he had to subtract from 999. We continued until he got down to zero. It was way fun, but unfortunately not the best practice, since Dallin quickly figured out that if he rolled his dice, he should arrange them into the largest number possible so as to get down to zero as fast as he could and therefore not have to do as many problems. |
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| We made Chinese Sesame Cookies. I also cooked a whole Chinese dinner for the family. That was one of those endeavors that I need to remind myself to avoid for next year! Some activities are more stress than they are worth, and really are not necessary for good homeschooling! We would have been just as well off to make the cookies and call it good. |
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