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!!!