Ancient Mayans, Vision, and Hearing (plus Grammar and Math)

As far as vision goes, we read some books and colored a diagram of an eye. Abigail was having a hard day and Joshua's favorite part was reading about pinkeye, because he now knows from experience what that is, I supposed. There were a couple of little activities regarding sight that we tried, but the only one I remember had to do with finding the blind spot in your eye. If you don't know, the retina of your eye is covered in special neurons called rods and cones which help you see. The only place on your retina without these nerves is where the optic nerve attaches and at that place you can't see anything but since you have two eyes usually your other eye just makes up for that blind spot and you don't notice. However, if you cover one eye and hold a paper just so in front of you and look in just the right way you can find "see" a part of the image disappear. It's really interesting but it was too hard for the kids to figure how how to do it, so it was more just frustrating for them.

But with the ears, we did a couple of fun things. Besides the books we read, we colored and labeled a diagram of the outer, middle, and inner ear. The kids thought this was fascinating. They were so interested in it in fact, that on the back of their papers they drew their own diagrams.  We also created rain sticks. This was an activity about the Mayans too since one of the books said they used rain sticks to help bring rain during dry times. But I thought it was good for the sense of hearing as well because you can see, touch, taste, or smell the beans inside of the rain stick, but you can definitely hear them. You wouldn't even know really what they were unless you had made the stick yourself. And your mind kind of tricks you into thinking you are hearing rain. At least, the sounds are somewhat similar.

We also made some bigger pinnae. A pinna is the outer part of the ear that you can see. We just experimented with listening to different sounds through our big "ears." It was interesting because the bigger ear blocked out all the peripheral vibrations but magnified all the vibrations coming more straight on. Now that I think about it, the kids may have been so interested in the ears because the idea of vibrations making noise was so new to them. I never think about that either really. It is kind of interesting.

Derek calls the rains sticks our stress sticks because every time a kid turns one over we freak out thinking somewhat has spilled a big glass of water somewhere.

For math we did a fun thing. Joshua officially finished his first grade year of math last Friday. His last unit was on money and I had a fun activity planned to help him with adding and subtracting money.  We made a magic book, we had done one of these last summer when we learned about making chocolate, from the suggestion of my book on making books. In fact, the entire activity came out of that book. I just photocopied her page and Joshua picked out how much each lunch item would cost. Then he had to pick the ones he wanted to buy, add up his total and subtract that amount from $10 (that's how much money he had to spend) and the figure out how much change he would get back.  He thought this was a lot of fun.

This is the secret panel only the author knows how to reveal. Very magical.

For grammar, actually, we had a fun activity too. Usually we just work out of a workbook with different lessons but one of his assignments for Thursday and Friday was to write an essay on one of his pets. He doesn't have any pets so I had him write about what it would be like if he did have one. He named his book, My Dog. Then, to make it interesting because Joshua hates writing more than anything else, we made the story into an easel book. Because Joshua knew this was a special project, he worked really hard on writing his story and then copying it down correctly and neatly. It's so nice to see when he actually puts forth some effort into his handwriting. Anyway, Joshua insisted I do one too. My prompt was "if I had a St. Bernard..." and then Abigail decided she needed a book as well. This was a very stressful morning, trying to put all these books together and it took a long time, but the kids were so proud of their books (I'm kind of proud of my book too!).

Abigail's is called "My Rabbit." She's working on bubble letters I think.

Lets see, with the Mayans, like I said, we made rain sticks. But I think the only other activity we did was our Mayan calendars. The Mayans had three calendars, really. The Tzolk'in, the Haab, and the Long Count (I can't really remember if that is the name of the third). The Tzolk'in was the religious calendar consisting of 260 days. That calendar cycled through 20 named days and 13 numbers. Number 1 went with the first name, Imix, and number 2 went with the second day, Ik, and so on. But when you got to day 1 again after going through all 13, you were on the 14th named day, Ben, so you can see by the time you got back to Imix, you would actually be on the number 7 or 8 or so. And then it took 260 days before you cycled back through to 1 Imix. That is the Tzolk'in.  The Haab is a 365 day calendar that was used more for everyday stuff like when to plant and when to harvest, etc. More like our calendar today. It had 18 months and each month had 20 days.  But the 1st day of the month was always 0. So, as the first month was named Pop, the first day of the year was 0 Pop, then 1 Pop, 2 Pop etc, up until 19 Pop, and then you moved onto 0 Ua, 1 Ua, etc. Eighteen times 20 is only 360 so at the end of the year the Mayans just added 5 "unlucky" days and then started again with 0 Pop. If you put the Tzolk'in and the Haab together you got a day that looked something like this 1 Imix 0 Pop. 1 Imix 0 Pop only happened once every 52 years, which they called a bundle, and thought of it as a chunk of time somewhat similar to how we think of centuries. The third calendar, so says the book we were reading, was so complicated and confusing that nobody except the priests knew how it worked or even cared about it. That is the calendar that ended on December 20th, 2012 - or right around that day, I can't remember exactly. It started at 3000 BC, which apparently was when the Mayans thought the world began. It was a pretty long and complicated calendar, as you can see and the book didn't bother to tell us any more than that.

We just mad a few Tzolk'in. Joshua decorated his with everything he could think of that had to do with the Mayans. So, if you look closely and can decipher 5 year old boy drawings, you will see lots of hot cacao drink, corn, tortillas, jaguars, temples, (calendars!), cacao trees, and probably something else I can't think of at the moment.

we kind of messed up and didn't cut her out glyphs small enough but Abby didn't seem to mind.

We also learned a lot about the Mayan numbering system, which is based on the number 20 just as ours is based on the number 10. They used steps in their numbers instead of columns like we do and I was hesitant to really teach Joshua too much about the numbers because I didn't want to confuse him. I mean, we just got through learning about adding and subtracting double digits with borrowing and such but we never really made it past 20 with the Mayan system anyway so we didn't run into any trouble.

Other than that, I think that's about all. I babysat a lot of kids again last week so things were busy but good. This week will be totally different! We're finishing off the 5 senses but we only have one cool activity to do and then we have only one activity for the Mayans as well which I think I've kind of messed up already, so we'll see how that goes.

Then it's off to the islands!!!

My favorite part of gardening

My favorite part of gardening only lasts a few hours. It is the time that it takes the little sprout to push itself out of the soil, straighten up, and fold out it's first two little leaves. It is sad that this little moment goes by so fast, but I suppose if it lasted longer it wouldn't seem as precious.

In case you are wondering what these little guys will grow up to be, the answer is tomatoes. Millions and millions of tomatoes.

"As we think about the imagery of succoring the weak, lifting up the hands which hang down, and strengthening feeble knees, I am reminded of a sweet seven-year-old showing her grandfather a small tomato plant she had started from seed as part of a second-grade school project.

She explained that from one tiny seed would come a plant. And if the plant were cared for, it would grow many tomatoes that would each have many seeds.

She said, “And if all of those seeds were planted and grew more tomatoes, and you planted all of those seeds, in a few seasons you would have millions of tomatoes.”

“All,” she said in amazement, “from one little seed.” "

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2013/04/this-is-my-work-and-glory?lang=eng&query=tomatoes

St. Patrick's Day -and- Kaleb is still cute

I'm ahead of the game by about 3 hours!

We like to "celebrate" St. Patrick's Day the weekend nearest the 17th since most of the "celebrating" has to do with food and the diets in this house are a little looser on the weekends. I won't explain further.

Like every year we had corned beef brisket with carrots, cabbage, and potatoes. But this year we added a mincemeat pie! Actually it was only mince pie. I only bought it because we were eating our St. Patrick's Day meal on Pi Day and I always forget Pi Day and this time I was reminded the day before. I had to look up on Wikipedia after I bought the pie if mincemeat could be pulled off as something Irish and I am satisfied enough that it is. (And no, I did not explain pi to the kids. The oldest is still only 6 - we just only finished borrowing and carrying after all!)

Awful picture

We also decorated our kitchen with some shamrocks! Fun.

And we decorated our front window with more shamrocks, a pot of gold, some money bags, a rainbow, and a leprechaun.

To make this somewhat educational I checked out one of the Mary Pope Osborne Magic Tree House series books about leprechauns and Irish folklore. This wasn't the story but the educational companion book to the story (the actual stories are always checked out already!) and we learned about Irish folklore and fairies. It was fun and cute. I thought that kind of thing was fun when I was little - pretending there were real fairies out in the woods and stuff and magical little wee folk, even if I didn't call them that.

We would be studying about the Celts for another 4 or 5 weeks or so but this will be kind of a good intro to that when we get there, since the book mentioned many times the Celts and the Druids. Seems hard to NOT mention them when educating people on Irish folklore. So we'll call this a sneak peak of what's to come. (Derek asked me again, why do we celebrate St. Patrick's Day, and I told him we aren't really celebrating anything, but it's just fun and everyone loves corned beef.)

Also, next week - tomorrow- Joshua is starting the very last unit in his first grade math year and it is about money. So if a little leprechaun just happens to leave him a little bag of gold coins tomorrow morning, he'll have some great math manipulatives to start out this last unit!

And Kaleb is still cute - adorable even if you ask me. And his soft little cheeks are so very kissable, even when covered with raspberry jam!

Ancient Mayans and the Nervous System

The Mayans are so awesome and I don't even know where to begin in showing my kids that. Especially because every book about the ancient Mayans that I can find - we're talking pre-classic and early classic period (about 600 BC to maybe 400 AD) are NOT written for little children. There are books for kids, but not for little kids. As Joshua put it, it's like the authors wrote the books in a way that you start reading and then you don't understand what they are talking about so you're not interested anymore, even though it is interesting. Our best book so far is actually one of the craft books - surprisingly there are two of those. Before introducing and giving instructions for the educational projects the books gives explanation and history of the item which is very clearly written and explained, so we liked that. We're spending more of our time in that book instead.

Our two activities related to the Mayans for last week include food. Corn and chocolate. We made homemade corn tortillas and filled them with corn and beans - seasoned with salt, chipotle, and cumin. Joshua ate a little and said he liked it so much, that he thought he must be more Mayan than American. That was funny. But really, it was delicious. And our hot chocolate was a chipotle hot chocolate drink that the Mayan kings and queens were suppposed to have enjoyed. Cacao beans were their currency for a time so the poor literally could not afford to drink hot chocolate. The recipe was so rich that it tasted like drinking semi-sweet chocolate chips. It wasn't thick and oozy. In fact is was quite watery and almost gritty - with all that cocoa powder in it - but it was really, really rich. And of course spicy. We thoroughly enjoyed that as well.

Another thing about the Mayans that I particularly found interesting comes from two books. The first is called "The Ancient Maya" by Lila Perl. She writes, "With the advent of the Classic Period of Maya civilization, starting around A.D. 200, society became more stratified, and a powerful elite arose at such Maya sites as Copan in Honduras, Tikal in Guatemala, and Palenque in Mexico. The clothing, jewelry, and personal adornment of priests, nobles, and rulers became elaborate and lavish beyond anything the peasants and other working people of the Preclassic Period had ever known. But as the general wealth of the Maya city-states increased, the populace aspired to imitate those aspects of adornment they could afford." I'm not saying the Mayan and the Nephites are the same people because I truly don't know (although now I am interested to learn more!) but this one paragraph reminded me of the following scripture from the Book of Mormon, 4th Nephi 1:23-25, "And now I, Mormon, would that ye should know that the people had multiplied, insomuch that they were spread upon all the face of the land, and that they had become exceedingly rich, because of their prosperity in Christ. And now, in this two hundred and first year there began to be among them those who were lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel, and all manner of fine pearls, and of the fine things of the world. And from that time forth they did have their goods and their substance no more common among them." Interesting. And if you didn't think so, maybe read it again and pay attention to the dates.

This got me thinking further, if the Nephite and Lamanite civilizations were indeed what archeologists call the Mayans (and maybe the Jaredites were the Olmecs) that would mean that history as we know it is all wrong, at least in a sense. Because archeologists are happy to tell us all the time that the Mayans worshiped all these different pagan gods - and I'm not saying they didn't. But there were a great number of them, and for a long time all of them, who worshiped Jesus Christ and believed the same thing taught to Adam and Eve and to Noah and Enoch and Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, and me. I think it is also interesting that every single ancient civilization we have studied this year is full of a gazillion pagan gods. But since Heavenly Father loves all His children, and we know that besides the "lost sheep" in the Americas, Jesus said there were other lost sheep He was commanded to go to, I don't see why there weren't other great and probably known civilizations that also worshiped Jesus Christ, at least for a time before they fell into apostasy. Wouldn't that be interesting if maybe the ancient Chinese also worshiped Jesus Christ for a time and had the truth? I think so. If the Mayans actually were NOT the Nephites and Lamanites, that doesn't really prove my idea wrong either really, but it makes it seem less plausible I suppose. I kind of seems like it is possible archeologists are only getting half the information about religion in ancient times and are assuming what they are finding about the pagan worship applies to the entire region the entire time, or they aren't understanding what they are finding and maybe these civilizations did have the truth, at least for a while. 

None of this speculating is really pertinent to my salvation, as they say, but I do think it is interesting.

For the nervous system we've read a lot of really fun and interesting books. The nervous system has always seemed kind of boring to me, but this time around it was so fascinating. Joshua still maintains the respiratory system is his favorite and Abigail has more than once said her favorite body part is her trachea. (what?) But my new favorite is the nervous system. Our books were awesome and our activities were too.  Our first paper was to color the brain and a neuron and label the parts and our second was an experiment testing whether practicing things could help our brain learn and get faster. We practiced reacting to a dropping ruler. We tried to catch it between our thumb and pointer finger and then measured and what inch mark we caught it. Joshua started out catching the ruler at about 8 inches but ended up at 3 inches. So yes, practice does help you get better and make things easier and faster. I tried to use this new and exciting information to explain to Joshua why he should be so excited about practicing the piano everyday but he wasn't very excited about that.

That doesn't sound like we did a lot, but in addition to the above mentioned things, and all of our regular learning things, plus preschool and music class for the kids, we did host 10 other kids this week at various times so we worked hard and we played hard and overall it was a great week.

Preschool: P is for Pink Eye -and- The Digestive System and Beauty and the Beast

I'm sorry, I should have posted this last weekend, but we were all trying to get over being sick.

Two weeks ago we learned about the digestive system and the letter P as in popcorn and "peas porridge hot" (in case you thought there was another sound for the letter P, I guess).

But we all got really sick. Mostly with colds, but after 3 or 4 days of Kaleb having super goopeys eyes with no end in sight I figured it was time to at least take him in to the doc. Pink eye. hooray. And that night when I got Joshua up to use the bathroom one of his eyes was nice and goopy/crusty. Pink eye strikes again. Luckily, no one else got it, although we were all paranoid and even Derek and I used some of the drops occasionally when our eyes started to hurt (the doc said that was fine and actually encouraged us to do so since pink eye is so contagious).  Kaleb was also on a strong dose of antibiotics for a ear infection pink eye combination. Apparently amoxocillin isn't good enough for that. After the eyes were looking better and the noses were less runny, the rashes and the sore throats began. Abigail, who didn't even get a cold or pink eye got the rash. I'm not quite sure how that worked, but it made her the most miserable.

Anyway, I suppose I can stop with the health update now. That's not really what this post is about, but it is kind of important because we didn't do a whole lot two weeks ago with homeschool. And even preschool was just one day, since I found out Wednesday night about the pink eye and had to cancel early Thursday morning.

What I can remember from that week - apparently I have a pretty short memory - is below.

For preschool I had planned the first day to talk about popcorn and the letter P. We had a very informative book about popcorn that I thought was going to bore the kids out of their mind, but they all sat at the edge of their... pieces of the carpet and were totally entranced. In fact, even while doing the little coloring sheet (practice writing P and p and then color the pictures that start with "p") two of the children were so into it I had to come up with some other activity to keep the rest busy until the two were finished. We played "which do you prefer" which is the same game as "would you rather" but I altered to to add a new word to their vocabulary... and prefer starts with p.  Believe it or not all the kids prefer watching movies over reading books. Well, they just haven't learned yet what they are missing.

For our snack we had party popcorn and peanut butter popcorn. The first time I made party popcorn I about gagged. Not really. But it was so sweet it kind of made my teeth hurt. Then we ate it all and I had to make another batch. Typical. The peanut butter popcorn was good, but not a sugary as the party popcorn and therefore, once the preschool kids had tried the party popcorn they all decided the pb popcorn they had just been raving about wasn't good and they wouldn't eat it anymore. Except my kids. They will eat anything that isn't salad.

party popcorn - just add melted white chocolate or almond bark and party sprinkles

PB popcorn - just add melted butter, melted peanut butter, and sprinkle with powdered sugar

Then we glued a bunch of regular popped popcorn onto big pieces of paper and played a lot. Play starts with P. I figure that counts as being educational. So educational in fact, that the girls played Princesses and the boys used the legos to put a Pirate in Prison. See, this P thing really sunk in.

Thursday we were going to have mini pancakes with peach jam on them for snack and learn the hand clapping game that goes with the rhyme Peas Porridge Hot, and there was a coloring page in there too, but like I said, we cancelled.

 Alright, enough preschool.

Our study of the digestive system wasn't as interesting as I thought it was going to be. Two or three years ago when we tackled it I remember making digestive juices in a baggy and watching our breakfast digest - in essence the baggy looked like it was filled with vomit and it was disgusting. We then all got sick and there really was a lot of vomiting going on at our house... sickness I guess goes with this subject at our house.

Let's just continue. We didn't have time to go to the bigger library and the ONE book about the digestive system was checked out at our smaller more local library but they did have a DVD of the Magic School Bus and one of the episodes on the DVD had elements of the digestive system on there. The video editors maneuvered around what happens to the remains in your GI tract after you've gotten all the nutrients out that you need, but the kids know what happens anyway. And since they were sick, the kids got to watch all the episodes on the DVD because they didn't feel well. Also, I had checked out that same book a week or so earlier, so we read the book first and then watched the movie. Kind of redundant, but watching movies sometimes feels like cheating, even if they are very educational. Also, the kids colored and labeled a diagram of the digestive system afterwards.

Later in the week we figured out how long our digestive system would be if we uncoiled all those small intestines. Twenty four feet! That is pretty long. In fact, it is longer than my living room so we had to go from northwest corner to southeast corner to get it all the fit. (And then we hung it up in the downstairs play/learning room from northeast to southwest.)

Sorry. I thought I had taken pictures of our digestive system diagram and the lab sheet we used to calculate our digestive system - you can find them both through Pandia Press try before you by - but i guess I didn't.

Since we were already taking a trip to our local little library I let the kids play on the computers. That was educational. Joshua found a game about the human body so he played that for awhile.

And finally, by this point I'm pretty sure (crossing my fingers) the kids weren't contagious anymore, we went to the city's production of Beauty and the Beast! My former running buddies daughter (she was also our former babysitter when I would go running with Kim) was Belle and she was fantastic. Really, absolutely wonderful. Lukas was on the edge of his seat. He had never been to the theater before and it was so exciting for him. Abigail sat on my lap and halfway through the show she started kissing my hands (I know this sounds really weird but when she is really happy she just wants to share the good feelings and since my hands were in her lap she just lifted them up and started giving them kisses!) so I'm pretty confident the kids had a very good time. However, they were all obviously still getting over their illnesses because right when it ended they all just wanted to go straight home, eat dinner, and go right to bed. It was 3:00 pm.

We didn't end up learning about the Mayans at all since we all felt so crummy I didn't really have a good plan anyway. It just sort of worked out better that way.