Celts and our Guest Teacher

In a previous ward Joshua had a sunbeam teacher who was fantastic. She used to teach for Challenger School here and she also just happens to have extensive knowledge and interest in the Celts (and as it turns out Native Americans as well so we might use her again!).  I asked her about a month ago or so if she would be interested in sharing some her interest with the kids when we learned about the Celts. She was so wonderful. She brought a dagger, some hand woven wraps, a few brooches, a drum, a blackthorn bush stick, a miniature Stonehenge (Joshua felt the need to point out to her that Stonehenge was built BEFORE the Celts, but I reminded him that it was still there at the time of the Celts and the Druids probably used it too), a small iron cauldron, a picture of the nature god of the Celts, can't remember his name, and a few books that were really fun to look at. She was so good about letting the kids touch everything which they did the entire time, but they also listened and learned a lot. Oh yes, she also brought dried out bog peat! So weird, that stuff! The kids learned a lot of new things and really reinforced the things we had already talked about. Some things I didn't know was that the blue ink they used to tattoo themselves was from a plant called woad, and they used to use water and lime to make a paste and give themselves crazy wild spiky hair to scare off their opponents. It was really interesting. She also brought a print out of another Celtic knot for the kids to color, which of course they loved.  She was there for about 1 1/2 hours! It was wonderful. I love this guest teacher thing!

She had also recommended a site to me for more information for the kids and I found this one at http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/celts/ which the kids have devoured! Joshua even exclaimed that it was better than Wild Kratts! They keep playing the little games and printing out more pages to color. Joshua liked outfitting the fierce warrior and Abigail enjoyed designing her own torc.

Seeds, Roots, and Stems

In order to avoid overly long posts, the last two weeks of science get their own post separate from history.

We started our botany unit with seeds. Besides reading many books (of course) we also dissected a Lima bean. We found the hard coat, food source, the embryonic roots, stem, and leaves. I also a had a little diagram for them to fill in and color so they could label and recognize all the seed parts. This activity was really interesting, really fun, and really effective. They dissected a LOT of lima beans. I soaked the beans in water first over night to that the hard coats would slip off the beans and they would be easier to pop open.

Also, we went outside to look for seeds. We first found the dandelion seeds (sigh) since they technically aren't really hiding out in my lawn, are they? But then we found a walnut, a pine cone (most of the seeds had been eaten by birds, but we did find one,) a bunch of seeds from an elm(?) tree, some maple tree seeds (the little helicopters) some bean pods and seeds from whatever that other tree is in our front yard, and we even found a maple tree seed that had started germinating in a crack in our driveway. That was a really remarkable find! I had the kids sketch each seed that we found so that we could see how different seeds can look.

The kids picked these seeds off the elm tree and pretended they were raining on me and Kaleb.

Later we planted a bunch of our flower seeds. I've got most of the vegetable starts going (and 8 of them in the ground outside) so it was time to start the flowers. I've planted marigolds, Abigail chose Candytufts, Lukas picked out Lavendar, and I can't remember what Joshua picked, something common but not terribly popular.  Again, we paid special attention to how all the seeds looked different and were even different sizes.

The biggest is the lima bean we dissected and the smaller bean was for our sprouting activity. The other four are the flower seeds we planted.

And lastly for seeds (actually we did this on the first day) we planted little string beans in plastic bags with moist paper towels to be able to actually watch them germinate. Joshua's started soaking up the water first and mine and Abigail's didn't seem to be doing much, but in the end, Joshua's just turned to mush, Abigail's never germinated, and mine began to grow!

The first activity we did for roots and stems had more to do with stems. We gave celery some colored water and observed what happened. After 4 hours the leaves were colored pretty well. Overnight the leaves darkened and so did the veins of the celery.

We learned from one of our root books that potatoes are actually a stem, not a root, but we planted one anyway. No results yet.

 Sweet Potatoes are still roots, though, so we planted some of those too. Our SP are looking a little fuzzing under the water on the window side. I'm not sure if that is the beginning of something friendly growing... or unfriendly. I had to warn the kids that grocers often spray their produce with growth retardant, so we might not get any growth, and even if we do, it might be limited. But we thought we'd try anyway.

And one day as we were transplanted tomato starts outside we happened to come upon a root in our way. So Derek took the hatchet and chopped it out of the ground for us, a portion of it at least. We examined the difference between a root and a branch.

 If you were able to zoom up close on this photo you would be able to see the tiny tubes in the root that suck the water up towards the stem. It was really neat to actually look inside a root.!

And lastly, that I remember, I had the children memorize a poem about seeds (sort of) and part of Joshua's handwriting for the stem/root week was to copy the following poem about roots. Actually, he copied both for his copywork, but we didn't work on memorizing the root poem.

Planting

I took a little seed one day
About a month ago.
I put it in a pot of dirt,
In hopes that it would grow.

I poured a little water
To make the soil right.
I set the pot upon the sill,
Where the sun would give it light.

I checked the pot most every day,
And turned it once or twice.
With a little care and water
I helped it grow so nice.

Dick Wilmes

A root of a plant,
  Must absorb water high,
From the ground, to the leaves,
So those leaves never dry...
They can do other things,
Work hard like an ant,
  They grow very strong,
Help support the whole plant...
They grow in the ground,
They grow in the mud...
They sprout from the seed,
Don't have any bud..
Don't produce flowers,
Not known to have leaves,
But store the plant's food,
Like hives do for bees...
Not bald like a baby,
Root hairs on their sides,
Roots are essential,
To help plants survive.
 

India, Africa, and the Celts

It made more sense to wait through two weeks before posting anything. I had a couple of two day units  and one fell on a Friday and Monday so instead of posting while only half way through ancient Africa, I chose to wait.

One of the main concepts our "textbook" (which we never read anymore, oops!) wanted us to cover was Ashoka and the concept of Buddhism. There are lots of fun picture books with Buddha stories in them at the library, and so that took up almost one day. There were also a couple of historic fiction easier reader chapter books that I read to the kid which they really enjoyed. One was about a young prince about to have his kingdom taken away from him by another kind in India but just then Alexander the Great shows up and takes everybody over. (They got all their land back in about a year since Alexander died and the empire was really too large to control.) The other was about a soldier who tries to be fierce and win the praise of his king (Ashoka) by being fearless and killing lots of people. But then after a terribly costly war the king looks out over all the dead bodies, feels horribly guilty and disgusted by his actions, and then converts to Buddhism. So the young warrior has to totally change his mindset in order to gain the king's favor. The books introduced very interesting concepts to the kids, like the caste system and the idea of someone being an untouchable. The untouchable part really made an impact on the kids.  And as it turns out, rice pudding is an ancient Indian dish, so we made some of that - although I didn't use all the spices and golden raisins and special rice like the recipe indicated (I used my own recipe.) The book also mentioned the recipe is different in different areas of India, so I decided it was probably fine. We got the idea at least.

And then the kids really wanted to do some sort of project. I had checked out this book

and I didn't find anything in there besides a Sari that was very specific to India so I hadn't planned on using it, for crafts at least. But since it had good historical information in it, I did read those pages to them. I told them they could go ahead and pick a project in the book they wanted to do and if we had all the supplies and they gathered them themselves I would help them out.  So Joshua picked out a balance for measuring, in his case, little toys. And Abigail made a little lamb out of cotton balls and a a toilet paper roll. His name is woolly.

Then Friday we started Ancient Africa. I always feel like Africa doesn't get very much attention, at least besides Egypt, because when people learn about Africa, they just brush the surface. There were many many kingdoms in Africa and they were so very, very different from each other. It's not all just lions and elephants, giraffes and zebras, you know? So I did find a few really good books talking about different empires and that was interesting to me at least. Since music and mainly rhythm was a large part of many of the various African cultures, we made a drum. We also listened to some traditional African music via youtube.

And finally, for Africa at least, I taught the kids how to play mancala. When I was in high school and worked at the YMCA before and afterschool daycare we played this game all the time. I played it so much that I had figured out a sequence of move that would pretty much guarantee me a win if I got the first move. The rules I know were just taught to me from the elementary school kids bat 15 years ago, and I've since seen this exact game online with an Asian sounding name, so I figure there is probably a good deal of variation. The real game looks like this...

our game looked like this, which is what the mancala boards in the US I've seen look like, except the ones you buy are made out of wood, not egg cartons.

I failed to mention, a friend of mine gave me all her homeschool supplies related to maps and geography so I had photocopied a map of India and a map of Africa out for the kids to color, but I guess I never took a picture of them. These maps not only help orient the kids on where in the world we are talking about, but I have them color the maps while I read to them, so their little hands stay busy and they still pick up on what I am saying.

The Celts. Well, I had originally planned to have a former neighbor of mine come out and teach the children about the Celts. She is way into Celtic everything and she used to teach kindergarten for a very popular charter school system here in Utah. Plus she was Joshua's sunbeam teacher back in the day. But although we communicated via facebook, I kept calling the wrong number so it didn't quite work out for this week. Instead, she is coming this upcoming Tuesday, so I will write a separate post for his visit.  At home I read a long book to Joshua about Celtic culture, which was really interesting. It was a little bit, but just a little, over his head, but Abby had a friend over for some reason so it was just Joshua and I sitting on my bed so he was able to really focus, see all the pictures, and not be interrupted when he had questions. I felt like he learned a lot.  The second day we also read books, but I printed out a few Celtic knot coloring pages for the children to color as I read. It was interesting to learn about them, especially since their history is very much interrelated with that of Ancient Rome, which we are starting on Monday (tomorrow). I think, in a way, it is kind of fitting that although we are leaving the Celts and starting Rome, we'll return to the Celts on Tuesday and then go back to Rome for good.  Here are some photos of a few coloring pages and then also Joshua tried his hand at a few Celtic knots himself. And lastly, a Celtic burial mound. I'm not sure Joshua put his whole heart into this one. :(