Math games

In 2012 at the annual Adventures in Homeschooling conference I attended a talk by math teacher John Bennett titled "No Math? No Problem", where he argued that math, which is fundamentally about inductive and deductive reasoning, would be better taught through logic games than traditional school exercises.

Here's a short TEDx version of it (which unfortunately doesn't include the part about his favorite logic games):

Since I met Bennett we've been playing math games, including the simple two-player game he taught us using teddy bear counters (the bears are useful and we keep a set handy, but any small objects you have in sufficient quantity will work).

Here's how the game works:

Set out on a table

• Five bears of any color (say, blue)
• Three bears of another color (say, green)
• Two bears of a third color (say, yellow)

Now, each player can take away as many bears of one color as they want - but they always have to take at least one bear, and they can't take bears of different colors on the same turn. The objective is to take away as many bears as you can without being the last one to take a turn. The player left with the last bear loses.

Here's an example game flow:

1. Player 1 takes the five blue bears
2. Player 2 takes the three green bears
3. Player 1 takes one of the two yellow bears
4. Player 2 loses, because now there is only one (yellow) bear left for her to take!

It's a really simple game of strategy where the players have to compute moves and outcomes to win.

This week we tried a new game that worked quite well: Think Fun Math Dice Jr. The youngest child played the short version of it while the older children played the full game. All could play at the same time, which was nice!

Drawing from life, and watercolors

In the past weeks we've been learning to draw from real life and paint with watercolors.

We've been using the book Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain, which is an excellent guide to learning to draw from real life.

E started with the exercises.

This is an upside-down copy of Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky: 

A few weeks later, when the weather was nice, I decided to teach the basics of aquarelle technique to the children. We started by watching this video I had made of my grandfather, who was a painter, and taught me when I was a teenager in art school:

During the next few days we went out to the nearby square and painted with watercolors. We learned to tape the paper to the board to prevent curling, to start the composition with the horizon, to paint wet on wet, etc. We started by doing a landscape of the Painted Ladies:

The next day we did a close up of the flower bed - same location, different framing & composition:

Learning how nature copes with the drought in California

We went on a hike in the Mt. Tamalpais national park with ranger Dave. Hikes with him are fascinating - he finds creatures (salamanders, centipedes, frogs...) where you wouldn't expect to look, and can tell a good story.

Northern California is experiencing a drought, and the lake on which the frogs breed was dry. Some of the frog population was apparently still hanging on, because we could hear them in the trees.

We found tiny holes made in acorns by acorn weevil larvae:

Spring birds

It's spring and we've been noticing a lot of bird activity going on, so we decided to spend some time learning about the birds around us. Our bird feeder recently broke in the storm, so it's been necessary to wander out of our own yard to see more of our winged friends.

We've been carrying Mac's Field Guides (the Northwest Backyard Birds and Northwest Coastal Water Birds ones) and putting stickers on the birds we spot. Among the ones stickered so far: the yellow-billed magpie, the California gull, the cedar waxwing, and the Western bluebird.

An American robin couple has been busy at work collecting grasses, twigs and other nesting materials from our yard, but we haven't been able to locate their nest yet.

We also went to the nearby Randall Museum, which has a great bird exhibit and was perfect for us, because we got to see many of the common (and some much less common) birds of the area close up. The cawing raven was everyone's favorite.

Also, we've played Christine Berrie's Bird Bingo, which is really great. (We recently also got the Bug Bingo as a present, and will probably use that too later on).

Among the books we've used are An Egg is Quiet, and DK Eyewitness Books: Bird. Photographer Sharon Beals also has a beautiful book out about birds' nests.

Baking from a recipe

Almost every week we bake something. This time, before baking oatmeal raisin cookies, R had the children first write down the ingredients and the recipe:

Then they got to work:

The cookies were eaten before I had the chance to take a picture!

Money: earning, saving, spending, donating and investing it – or not having any

This week we've discussed money: earning it, spending it, saving it, donating it and investing it; as well as situations where people find themselves without enough money to live on. Thematically this was was a follow-up to the unit on jobs.

The San Francisco Bay Area has both poverty and extreme wealth, and we live in a neighborhood where the two co-mingle, so wealth and inequality are important themes in our everyday lives.

In anticipation of this we had watched Chaplin's The Kid, about poverty in the tenements. It is probably his best movie, and the children loved it.

In the morning we read Judith Viorst's Alexander Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday. Before starting we had set out a cup full of 100 pennies. The children counted out the pennies each time Alexander spent some – until he was no longer rich.

One evening in the week we watched the 1971 film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and discussed it (we prefer it to the Tim Burton one). We also read the book out loud over the course of the month – we recommend the edition with the original illustrations by Joseph Schindelman. Here are my notes:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - discussion

• Veruca Salt - wanted a golden goose but fell in the garbage chute
• Violet Beauregard - gum-chewer who turned into a blueberry
• Augustus Gloop - obese boy who fell in the chocolate river
• Mike TeaVee - always watching screens, was shrunk by the WonkaVision contraption
• Charlie Bucket - the hero, stole fizzy lifting drinks but gave back the Everlasting Gobstopper at the end.
• Slugworth - the evil competitor of Willy Wonka, who offered $10,000 to Charlie if he could bring him just one Everlasting Gobstopper (but who was really Willy Wonka’s agent)
• Willy Wonka - was he good or bad? He let bad things happen to the mean kids, but they were ok in the end.
• Grandpa Joe - understood what it’s like to be a kid - but foolishly got Charlie to try the fizzy lifting drinks

What happened in the end? What do you think Charlie will do with the chocolate factory? What will Willy Wonka do?

To the children, Veruca Salt was the most intriguing character.

C had ordered a Money Savvy Pig (a piggy bank with slots for Save, Spend, Donate, and Invest) for the school. We talked about what each of the slots means, and decided to save up for a telescope.

Last summer C and S set up a lemonade stand on the High Line in New York with some friends, which was a financial success. Now we revisited that experience and role-played the various decision points: deciding what enterprise to embark on (we pretended we were a family-owned pizzeria), investing your starting capital, putting in the work to create a product, and then selling it for a profit.

On another day, we discussed spending the money we have earned, and how our wants are different from our needs (this unit on wants and needs can be found in the Oak Meadow curriculum). The children ran around house labeling things with Post-Its: red for things they thought they really needed, green for things they wanted but didn't really need.

The dog got a red sticker:

We are planning to keep developing the theme by creating our school store, perhaps on Etsy, when we have come up with a good enough product to sell.

Wind and Poetry

The thermometer outside our window broke in the wind! It was quite windy this week.

We also learn poetry, and since it was windy, we learned "Who has seen the wind" by Christina Rossetti:

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through. 

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by. 

I learned this when I was a child too.

I am a great lover of literature, and when looking through the curriculum we use as a template for our classes, I was not impressed with the poetry at all. The stuff you learn as a child sticks in your head for the rest of your life, so it's better to have good poetry stuck in there! So, we've had some Blake, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Makepeace Thackeray, in addition to Christina Rossetti, who wrote wonderful poems suitable for children.

First the hands, then the heart, then the brain

Today a friend from New York sent us this article by Ian Johnson in The New Yorker about the spread of Waldorf education in China. 

We're Waldorf-inspired (what education isn't!) – even more so when it comes to getting our hands dirty; drawing on myths from around the world; and the somewhat lighter-than-usual emphasis on symbol manipulation and screens.

This quote sums it up nicely:

The movement was founded by the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner, who “believed that children should be guided slowly out of what he termed ‘the etheric world,’ where they existed prior to birth, and that education should engage first the hands, then the heart, then the brain,” Johnson explains. “Waldorf-educated children play a lot when they’re young, and often don’t learn to read until second or third grade.” The Waldorf curriculum “reflects Steiner’s belief that an individual’s development mirrors a civilization’s, so the early years include lots of creation myths and fables.”

Ways of responding to injustice

On Friday we discussed ways of responding when someone is unfair to you.

To prime the conversation we read The Goose Girl, a Brothers Grimm tale about a princess who was treated unfairly by her lady-in-waiting after being sent to marry a foreign prince.

The lady-in-waiting switched roles with the princess and married the foreign prince; but in the end the real princess was redeemed and the miscreant maid was condemned to exile (we used this somewhat languid but more defensible punishment in the Oak Meadow version of the story; in the original Grimm version she was thrown naked into a cask, stuck with sharp nails, and dragged from street to street till she was dead!)

It was obvious to the children that the princess was not treated fairly by her maid. But when I asked how they would have acted if they had been in her place, they had to think about it, and didn't agree at first.

Should injustice be tolerated? Of course not. Then why didn't the princess tell anyone? The lady-in-waiting had made her promise not to tell any living being, on pain of death. It was only when the foreign king overheard her lament her troubles to the fire that he caught wind of who she really was.

Should the princess have refused to give her word to the delinquent lady-in-waiting, and fought to defend herself? Or should she have pretended to go along with the scam, but broken her promise to the maid as soon as it was safe to do so?

And did she really keep her word in the end?

I plan to return to these questions later, when we do a unit on Gandhi and nonviolent resistance.

From garden to table

Earlier in the year we hired a professional chef, who used to own a vegetarian restaurant. She prepares breakfast and lunch for the school, and we love her cooking! Here's her menu for this week:

The lettuce, which the children planted earlier, is also now ready to be harvested for use in the school meals. (Last week they also planted strawberries, which you can see to the right of the lettuce in the photo below. The fenced one in the back is a tomato plant.)

There's something wholesome about the simple fact that the children grow the food they eat. And help turn them into delicious meals!

Valentine's

The children had made Valentine's cards – almost 100 of them! – and today we put them all in baskets and went to visit a nearby nursing home with our friends.

They went around with their baskets like little elves, wishing happy Valentine's to the residents, handing them cards along with sweets and fresh flowers R had bought in the morning.

Even the grumpy grandpa got one.

Celsius and Fahrenheit

Since we split our year between the US and Europe, the children are familiar with converting measurements between euros and dollars, kilometers and miles – and of course, Celsius and Fahrenheit.

Yesterday we did a short unit on measuring temperature and the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. 

I had attached a large thermometer outside the tower room window, and we had another one handy in the classroom, so the children could hold it and compare differences outdoors and indoors. 

They also drew their own thermometers with both C and F scales. Here are a few pictures!

Archery

Bows and arrows have not gone out of style.

On Tuesdays the children have been attending Trackers' Bay, an outdoors adventure program for homeschoolers, headquartered in the storybook style former Marmot Mountain Works building in Berkeley (which has a colorful history of its own).

One of the things they do at Trackers – and frankly we hope they would do more of it! –  is learn archery. They also have a special Bowmaking Academy in the summer.

The kids – E especially – are seriously interested in archery. I have made about a dozen bows and countless homemade arrows, progressively cutting down the juniper in the back yard.

We watched the 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood (with Erol Flynn) and observed archers at the Golden Gate Park archery range.

After consulting websites, some books and Stewart the archery teacher at Trackers, I purchased a 20lb junior longbow from Trackers (you can also order a hand-made one from Etsy), portable target, plus of course arrows (and quiver) for practicing.

 E hit the bullseye on his third shot.

We're missing a good place to practice, though – our back yard in San Francisco is too small. It's definitely a summertime activity for Finland.

I don't feel like I'm doing a good job helping E and the others learn it on their own right now. My availability is a bottleneck, because the powerful new bow requires adult supervision. That was an unintended consequence – they may end up practicing less now because of this.

If you have suggestions, let me know!

(Update: we found a nice, safe spot for kids' target practice - yay! If interested, join our Meetup! Also, another homeschooling dad recommended joining the Redwood Bowmen, which seems like a great archery club)

Working with clay

One of the children's favorite classes is ceramics at Kids N' Clay Pottery Studio in Berkeley. Over the past few years they have made tens if not hundreds of clay figures, dishes, and art pieces under the direction of studio owner David and his staff.

There's something inherently satisfying about molding soft clay – you can close your eyes and it feels alive.

The jobs we have

Today we discussed what jobs people have, and the roles in a household. 

We read a story about George Washington as a child (from the Oak Meadow 1st Grade curriculum) and discussed it, and drew pictures of the members of our households and their jobs.

It was a great conversation! We discussed (and debated) questions such as:

• what it means to be responsible for something
• what is fair to ask others to do and what's not
• when someone is being a good or bad leader
• how to motivate others to accomplish things as a team – we all agreed the best way to do that is by example!

It was fascinating to hear what the children see as their jobs, and the jobs of the other grown-ups in the household; and even the pets! Some examples:

• Mother "works at the office to make money so everybody can buy things"
• Father's job is to "be a dad and be a teacher"
• A boy said his job was "to play drums, do my workbook, and listen to my dad"
• A girl said her primary job was "to decide whether to play with [her brother] or [her sister]"
• A girl said her job was "to steal butter all day long"
• Mom's job is to "have conferences so she can talk and say her work"
• A toddler brother's job is "to eat and eat and eat"
• The dog's job is "to keep company to R [the assistant]"
• Girl: "my job is to listen to mama and play, play and play"
• According to a girl, her father's job is to "play TV to get more money for me"

Shadow theater

Over the past two weeks we have been working on the art of playwriting: inventing characters, describing scenes, making up a plot, writing a script, and making storyboards.

We started by making shadow puppets (the week's poem was also about the shadow theme). I bought the Moulin Roty Fabric Shadow Theater Set so we had an example to study:

We then made our own characters and props. We traced the outlines of interesting images from books, transferred the outlines to crafting paper, cut the shapes out, and taped chopsticks and straws on the back.

We then wrote our first simple script together as a group (the children came up with the story and I wrote it down):

Then we performed it! Each child also performed an improvised robber story using the Moulin Roty characters (I let them choose if they wanted to perform solo or in pairs):

The following week we learned about making storyboards. We looked at some examples (including this Alice in Wonderland sneaker commercial storyboard I found on DeviantArt), then made our own ones. The template used here is the 3x4 aspect ratio template 01, available for free download from Flying Animator:

We're now ready to create our first play! Hopefully under the direction of a friend who is an award-winning playwright and actor. Stay tuned...

From Linda Stone: The Time We Have (in Jelly Beans)

Re-blogging a wonderful post by our friend Linda Stone:

http://ashow.zefrank.com/episodes/128

My friend’s 16 year old son stopped playing video games. Cold turkey. From hours a day in front of the screen one day to those same hours spent with friends ever after. 

“Why did you stop?” his mother asked.
“Jelly Beans. My life in jelly beans.” 

Thanks to Ze Frank for creating this powerful video!

Studies of Hindu gods and goddesses

As a follow-up to the statue hunt, each child picked a Hindu god or goddess to study in more detail. Here are some of them:

Kali the goddess of Time and Change, death, the annihilator of evil forces

Shiva as Daksinamurthy the perfect guru

Shiva as the dancing Nataraja, destroyer of the universe

The studies above were based on drawings in Hindu Gods and Goddesses by Swami Harshananda. We have also been using The Essentials of Hinduism: A Comprehensive Overview of the World's Oldest Religion as a teacher's resource, and read aloud from Tales of Hindu Gods and Goddesses, along with material I've adapted from online sources.

Gardening lesson

We decided to work with the children to plant a vegetable garden, to provide the veggies for the school lunches, which our new chef has taken to a new level. 

The Rhizome Urban Gardens team were eager to help us, and last week Jamie and Asha from Rhizome came to teach our first gardening lesson, which was a great success! 

Jamie introduced some key gardening tools and we learned about different types of soil, what worms do, and planted various kinds of lettuce. This week we'll continue with a focus on weeds and climbing plants, and also plant peas. 

Here's a video of Asha explaining to the class how micro-organisms in the soil help plants grow:

My Shadow

Most of the children can now recite the poem we learned last week: My Shadow – our longest one yet! It is by Robert Louis Stevenson, who also wrote Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. 

Here it is, coupled with a cursive-writing exercise (I write the cursive and the kids trace it. I also ask them to sign their sheets in cursive).

My Shadow

By Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;

And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes goes so little that there's none of him at all.

He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close behind me, he's a coward you can see; 

I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;

But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

Here is a recital of it by Billy Connolly, with clips from Disney's Peter Pan (the audio is way better than the video, imho).

Yesterday they picked a new poem to learn: At the Zoo by William Makepeace Thackeray. We will be working on memorizing it this week.