The problem with skipping a week with blogging is that then your blog titles become really long and cumbersome.
For the last two week we have been learning about ancient China. I was so excited for this unit because China (ancient and more recent) is totally fascinating to me. But it has been hard to gauge whether the kids are really getting the feel and understanding what China was like. Not that I really know myself, actually because I've never even been to modern China, but still. Even if the kids don't grasp the concept of ancient China the way I think it is, they'll learn about it again later. And I know they are having fun with what they are learning.
We've studied the Great Wall of China and Qin Shi Huangdi, who was the "first emperor" of China. We've actually read a lot about him and the wall. We've read about brush painting and Chinese characters. We've read about the Silk Road and the discovery of silk. We've read about the Terra Cotta Warriors (they were Qin Shi Huangdi's). We've learned about the Chinese Zodiac and what year we were born (Joshua was born in the year of the pig and that didn't make him too happy, and Abigail was born in the year of the Ox. Lukas in the year of the Tiger, and that seems fitting, and Kaleb was born in the year of the rabbit. I'm a rooster. As a kid reading the place mats at Chinese restaurants, I always felt gypped.) And we made Chinese lanterns to celebrate the Chinese Lantern festival, which luckily I didn't miss. It is generally celebrated 15 days after the Chinese New Year, which meant this year it landed on Valentine's Day. We read a lot of Chinese stories that had some basis in actual history as well. And we ate some noodles for luck on the Lantern Festival Day, and then had some real/American Chinese food from a restaurant later and practiced with chopsticks.
These are the noodles I made for our lantern festival. It's just shrimp flavored Ramen noodles with frozen "Chinese" stir fry veggies and some chicken. I just modified an oriental beef and broccoli recipe I had. (The beef and broccoli is better)
These lanterns were so frustrating to make. I just used the tissue paper I had on hand so we were restricted to Christmas colors and the instructions were so weird and overly complicated. We could have made this in maybe 10 minutes max, but instead it probably took 45 or more. If you're interested, just look at the photo and you can figure out how to make these way easier than reading the instructions from whatever book I had checked out. The kids had a lot of fun with them so I'm still glad we made them.
Brush painting
I later added color to this one. The characters at the top say "mountain" "forest" "river" I have a feeling these characters are modified characters and not the real ancient ones. Next week we will turn our paintings into wall hangings.
This book is a fabulous book when learning about Chinese characters. It explains things so well and the story is very touching. It almost made me cry. Spoiler alert: the grandpa dies. I highly recommend this book.
I thought this book would be a little over the kids' heads but it wasn't. And it was actually fascinating. There was a ton of information and although some of it was a review of things we had already learned, it meshed really well with the main topic of the book that we didn't mind reading it again. Plus, even besides the Terra Cotta Warriors, we learned lots of new stuff that we hadn't read in any other book.
We used playdough to make our own "playdough" warriors instead of Terra Cotta clay. This is Abby's warrior - sorry the picture is on its side.
Abigail also made this blue thing. I asked her what it was and she laughed and said, "nothing."
Joshua made a Terra Cotta warrior with his crossbow and spear waiting in the tunnel where he was left. And then he made the Great Wall of China with a watch tower and everything.
Real (restaurant bought) Chinese/American food. Egg rolls, wontons, beef and broccoli over rice, and chicken lo mein. Noodles were eaten more in the north where they grew wheat and rice was eaten more in the south where they grew the rice.
Next week, because I felt like adding another week to China after I realized we might not have enough material to cover us through the end of May, we are going to be looking more in depth into Confucius or Master Kong as he was known before the Jesuits came, and Lao Tzu (Daoism), and more of the ancient mythical legends and stories of gods and goddesses. Also we are going to learn about Fa Mulan (the real one) and then watch the Disney movie. I'm toying with the idea of making Joshua write a report about ancient China, 1st grade style, but I haven't decided whether or not to torture him with having to actually write more than 5 lines at a time.
Ok, after the skeletal system we went to the muscular system. I have to start out by saying that I had great hopes for this unit. However, I've been so extremely tired the last 2 weeks that I'm just glad to say we made it through. I'm still tired, and for awhile I thought maybe something was wrong and I should go to a doctor or something but I bet it has more to do with Kaleb screaming every night, eating a diet mainly consisting of chocolate chips, and going to bed later than usual, plus the 4 little kids and homeschooling thing. So I'm not going to worry about it.
But my fabulous plans were to learn about our muscles of course through books but then also keep a running chart of our stretching and push ups and sit ups. The idea was we would stretch and excersize a little in a measurable way and then track our progress. Through this we would learn that stretching our muscles gets easier and helps us move better and as we use our muscles through excersize, we are making them stronger. In reality, although the kids got the message about exercize, I think we did our muscle routine maybe twice. Oh well. And Joshua insisted on calling every meat item at our dinner table "muscle" instead of chicken or beef or whatever. On our weekly menu he requested I change "chicken and rice" to "muscle and rice" which I did not do. Still, we learned about the three different types of muscles. Skeletal or voluntary, smooth or involuntary, and cardiac muscle.
That lead us straight into this last weeks science unit - the circulatory system. I have to say, I know it sounds so boring when I say over and over again, we read books about blah blah blah, but we had found some awesome books at our library! We learn so much. So we started out by reading some books. And then we did our first lab that I had printed off from Pandia Press's "try before you buy" option. Mostly we just did different activities and then checked our heart rate. We hypothesized about which activities would make our heart beat harder, we graphed our results, and then reviewed our results and checked them against our hypothesis. Our second science day we learned more about the make up of blood. I'm sorry now that I didn't take a photo, but there is an incredible book about blood which a picture of a vampire and a little Frankenstein on the front. It was really a wonderful book. The kids learned that blood is made up of plasma, red blood cells, white blood cells, and plasma. They learned what each of these parts do. They learned about heart chambers and arteries, veins, and capillaries. Our second lab, courtesy of Pandia Press, was to make a model of blood. The ingredients include red hot candies, white lima beans, split peas, and corn syrup.
Next week for science we are moving to the respiratory system and our lab actually builds upon what we've been learning with the circulatory system and I have printed out two more labs that I think will be fun.
And last but not least, I never posted a photo of the party favors from Abby's party. In addition to all these fun goodies, the girls also brought home the crowns they had decorated during the party. So in all they had a crown, a bracelet with their name on it, two suckers, a ring, some princess stickers, and some pop beads.
