Native American Lesson - Pictographs

Today I want to write about a lesson that has not failed me twice within a couple years - even with the same kids! Two years ago, when my daughters were 8 and 6, we did a unit study with another family, and this lesson was a hit. This year, we did a two-day study with our "Enrichment Group" (which is basically a co-op, but we don't limit ourselves to strictly "academic" subjects, so we thought co-op was a little too confining), and my girls found their notebooks and begged me to do the same lesson with this group. It required almost no prep time or effort, and the kids were mesmerized. I think the moms were mezmerized too at how their kids were listening and volunteering to share their stories.

So here is what we did. I started off talking about writing in general, why it is useful in everyday life, and how some spoken languages don't have written language to go with them. Using a wonderful website - http://www.inquiry.net/OUTDOOR/native/sign/stories.htm - I told the kids about pictographic writing, and how Native Americans used it. There are no ready printouts on the website, but I copied and pasted the stories into Word and added their respective pictures. I made enough copies to hand them out to each child. Then I read the stories out loud as the kids followed the pictures and tried to guess what each symbol stands for. Then I gave them a picture of a buffalo hide and asked them to make up their own pictographic story. This sounds so easy to do, and it was a lot of fun. We have twin girls in the group who hardly ever speak in front of others, and they VOLUNTEERED to tell their stories. We have a girl who just lost a horse, and she told us in her pictographs the emotional story of what she had gone through. It was a wonderful and rewarding day.

Math Mini-Office Pictures

Math Mini-Office

Math Mini-Office - the links I used

As promised, these are the sites that I found the most helpful:
Proverbs 22:6 Academy -- detailed directions, along with the list of what's included and resources.
Mrs Jessop Teachers' Notes -- the divisibility rules poem and other stuff.
BBC Bitesize Math - data analysis resources
Kids Online - decimals
Fraction Operations Rules
Fraction Operations Rules, page 2
Math Is Fun - parts of a circle
BBC Bitesize Math - shapes

Math Mini-Office Documents

It was more difficult than I thought it would be to find exactly what I was looking for, so I ended up creating some documents from scratch. Maybe they will help others who would like to make a mini-office for their children. Here is what our mini-office covers:
Basic Operation & Order of Operations
Multiplication Table (and an example of a couple multiplication problems that have a zero in them)
Divisibility Rules (and an example of a division problem with a zero in its quotient)
Data Analysis
Place Value
Decimals (Examples of operations with them)
Fractions
Types of polygons and 3-D shapes
Types of Triangles
Types of Symmetry (also in my earlier post)
Types of Lines
Congruent vs. Similar
Parts of a Circle

Here is a layout we used. I used PrimoPDF to be able to upload the document, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to change the page orientation and make it permanent. If you know how, please leave a comment!

Math Mini-Office Layout

Get your own at Scribd or explore others:

Here are some graphics I used, including the Area/Perimeter information I put together for this mini-office:

Math Mini-Office Selected Graphics

Get your own at Scribd or explore others:

I'm still working on the pictures of the finished mini-office. I will also post some links to sites that I found particularly helpful.

Beethoven Lapbook

Beethoven Lapbook


This lapbook is based on another story by Anna Celenza, called The Heroic Symphony. It was not as easily accessible for an 8-year-old, but it provided nice exposure for her, and for me!

Mussorgsky Lapbook

A couple years ago we did a lapbook on Mussorgsky. I dug it out the other day and looked through it again with great pleasure. It is based on a book Pictures at an Exhibition by Anna Harwell Celenza. Instead of sending you to Amazon, I've linked it to the publisher's site which includes the author's note about the book. If you have not read this book (or other titles by this author), please do -- they are wonderful. We have made a couple lapbooks based on her stories, and this is one of them. We took our time. I made sure we listened to the piece as a whole, but also that we spent time listening to one part at a time, and to help with that, I asked my daughter to draw pictures - one every couple days, maybe even one a week - to illustrate each movement of this piece. Here is the finished product.




Mussorgsky Lapbook

If you decide to listen to this music and talk about it, make sure you find Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition - A Naxos Musical Journey. We got it at Netflix. If you do, it might help if you have a list at hand with the names of all the movements, because even though the video images are stunning and very well matched to the music, if I remember correctly, there are no explanations even the form of a title of each movement - except for the title page of Mussorgsky's music sheets. I remember having to pause and rewind a lot not to miss stuff.

SlideShare

Having to explore a couple sites for my work, I actually found something I could use in homeschooling. SlideShare is like Scribd for PowerPoints. As an exercise, I was supposed to "embed" a presentation that I liked here, and since we are doing the Ancient World, here is a presentation about Theater in Ancient Egypt.

Ancient Egyptian Theatre

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: theatre history)

It is beautifully done and it inspired me to try and work on a Power Point Presentation with my 8 year-old. I'll be sure to add it to SlideShare when we are done.

Math Mini-office

I'm working on the mini-office for my 6th grader. I thought I would be able to quickly find everything online, but I have not been very lucky. There is a lot of early elementary stuff, or high school stuff, but not so much for her age. So I'm creating my own documents as I go along.

Types of Symmetry

Get your own at Scribd or explore others:

This one is on three types of symmetry.

Back to Bloggin'

Must be time to start blogging about our homeschooling. Just feels right. Don't know how often I'll get to it, or how useful others (who stumble upon it) may find it. I hope it inspires ME. I'm not much into "musings" so I'll stick to facts. And lists. And pictures.



Today the kids went to a science class at Anita C. Leight Estuary center. They did Microscope Exploration and their instructor sent us some pictures of plankton that they looked at through the microscope. It's interesting because we had apparently looked at plankton a couple days earlier when we took samples of the tiny white specks that we saw darting about in the water from Conowingo vernal pools. We were wondering what those creatures were -- they must be plankton as well. We noticed two kinds, looking almost the same except for two clumps of eggs that one of them was carrying of either side of its tail. This is the one with the eggs.

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Today's trip to the Estuary Center followed our Sunday hike with the girls' cousin from Illinois. On Sunday I saw a lot of interesting plants, but the girls were busy just enjoying a good run and the company of their cousin.

Here are some of the things that captured my attention:

This is the flower of the Pawpaw tree.

(Plantae>Magnoliophyta>Magnoliopsida>

Magnoliales>Annonaceae>Asimina triloba (L.) Dunal)

Jusdging by the info I got from a brief google search, we'll be back there checking out this little pawpaw tree to see just how "malodorous" the crushed leaves are and to find some Zebra Swallowtail caterpillars who like to feast on them.

Right now it's attracting only two big fat ants.

We also learned that there is actually a white redbud -- a redbud tree with white blossoms. It is called Royal redbud, as opposed to the familiar pink kind, called Eastern redbud.

We saw a hummingbird, when it didn't even seem like there were any flowers for it to feed on. It was very heartwarming to see it -- summer must be closer than it seems.

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And here is the last two pictures for today. One is the puzzle and the other one is the answer.

This is a blossom from a tree that is rather common and is noticed a lot in the fall thanks to its seed pods. We got out our miscoscope and looked at the little balls that make up those bigger balls that you see attached to the stalks and found pollen on them. And just to prove that internet has EVERYTHING, here is what I learned about these flower clusters. What you see above is just a big bunch of stamens (male parts that produce pollen). They fall off after the pollen is passed on to the female parts -- pistils. The pistils collect the pollen and throughout the summer and fall develop into a fruit and a seed pod with tiny seeds in it. Of course, when we find the seed pods in the fall, there are hardly any seeds left in it. Apparently, little birds love them.

The seed pods look like brown balls in the fall. Even now they look like little balls with soft spikes on them.

When we pick them up from the ground in the fall, the spikes are hard and a little prikly (not too bad).

Through the spikes in the fall you can see small holes, and probably no seeds -- they would have fallen out and dispersed, or been eaten by birds.

This is what it looks like in April, with stamens and pistils all together on one branch.

The mystery is solved -- it is a sweetgum tree, with its flowering part that it is about to lose on the top (to the right of the branch) and the gum ball that will form and nuture the seeds at the bottom (to the left of the branch).