CHRONiCLES FROM THE MAGIC SCHOOL HOUSE: PING

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but a lighting of a fire."

~William Butler Yeats

The "D" Bag

contents of the "D" bag: duck, doll, dog, dress-up, doctor

Violet making the "wise eyed boat"

recording what we learned about China in learning journal

Loading Pings 42 cousins, 11 aunts, 7 uncles, 3 brothers,

2 sisters, his mother, and father into the wise eyed boat

This was our first week of home school. I have to say it was quite successful. We are using the Five in a Row and Saxon Math Kindergarten curriculum as the foundation of our learning. We started with The Story of Ping. This was the cornerstone of our lessons throughout the week.

Since Ping the duck, lives along the Yangtze River in China, our learning revolved around China, and ducks.

Five in a Row includes story disks in their curriculum so that you can label locations of character in the books. We placed Ping on the map and made one to label our home.

We also had a tea party with the tea set my mom and dad brought back from China town. Violet thought this was very cool.

We read about ducklings, sang six little ducks, made "D" ducks,

did experiments to find out what sinks and floats, read Duck at the Door, and Daisy Comes Home (the sweetest little book about a girl who lives in China).

To conduct your own float/sink experiment:

Our experiment was based on one from a really cool book called Science Play!

1. Fill a large bowl, tupper or bucket with water

2. Go around the house and gather things that you think will float or sink.

3. Get out your learning journal and hypothesise (make guesses) the items that you think will float or sink. Write or draw those in your journal.

4. Drop the objects into the bowl one by one.

Record your findings in your journal. Since Violet is just now learning how to write her ABCs and spell words we made a key of the colors we used to denote whether the object sinks, floats, or floats and then sinks. Then we circled each object with the appropriate color.

Have fun!

Also, check out the Magic School Bus Ups and Downs: A Book About Floating and Sinking. It is a cute story and has another fun float/sink experiment in the back that you can do.

On Friday we had our first official movie night and watched Big Bird Goes to China. I think we are going to try and do this every other week it was a lot of fun. We made noodles and ate with chopsticks. Earlier that day Violet and I read Food from China. In this book they talk about Moon Cakes, a traditional food served at the Moon Festival. I had every intention of making them from this recipe. My computer would not cooperate (it has been on the fritz) so we improvised and made the cardamom carrot cupcakes from a book that Mimi gave us. They were delicious. All in all a great week.