Classical Conversations Week 21 Bonus

Tutoring was really fun! I'm not sure how well I did, but the kids and the parents were very kind if I messed up :)

I wanted to share my math supplement

It's pretty easy, just a printout with the 2 laws and 3 categories.  We did addition, mainly because multiplication would have required too many M&Ms.  The Associative Law for Addition is
(a + b) + c = a + (b + c).  Before class, I put one of the sheets and the candies (2 orange, 3 blue, 5 green, but you can obviously use any color) in a ziplock baggie.  Then we took moved the candies around  to do 5 + 5 and 2 +8.  Either way it's 10!

The woman that I subbed for also left an activity.  It was a printout with the two laws in a much larger font, and then she cut out parenthesis from construction paper for the kids to glue in the appropriate places. 

For my afternoon class, I decided that we would do something that "followed" our history sentence a little.  I brought giant bags of recycling and some boxes, along with tape, glue, markers, tin foil, and whatever else I could dig up.  Then I tasked the kids with creating a rover to explore a new planet I made up.  I provided them with some printouts of the Mars Rover and some guiding questions (How will it get to the planet, how will it move on the planet, what information will it collect and how, how will it communicate with earth) and then I turned them lose in teams. 

The kids had so much fun! I actually had to stop them so that I could get them to present to each other! We spend about an hour and 40 minutes on this activity and then we did a few seconds of outside play.  The kids did a fantastic job.

Leap Day Math

I'm trying to be better about "fun" things for the kids, like crafts and holiday activities.   Since today was leap day, I decided that we were going to try to do a little "leaping of our own to go along with our CC memory work for math.  This week our memory math is 1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters.  First, I made up a batch of cook play dough.  I've used this recipe before and it's never given me any trouble, but due to a lack of flour I halved it and it was SUPER sticky this time.  After cooking it, I added a ton of green glitter.  The goal was to make "Frogs" for our place value lily pad game, but the dough turned out really sticky, even though it looked fantastically glittery and fun :) 

We had a few friends come by in the afternoon, so they were subjected to our math games, too! Everyone lined up at the corner of a wall and then did their best "leap".  We marked it with a construction paper lily pad and then measured in centimeters and inches.  Logan wrote his own numbers and name.  He's doing really well with his printing and starting to feel more confident writing, especially in front of others!!

Our hypothesis was incorrect- we guessed that the person with the longest legs would leap the furthest, but Logan and Riley jumped equal distances!!

Next we did a game with place value.  I made lily pads labeled "ones", "tens" and "hundreds".  Since our play dough didn't work out, we used our Singapore math cubes in green.  The kids rolled a die to see how many "frogs" went on each lily pad.  For Logan, we just did ones and tens and then he wrote the number on the white board and told me the name.  For Katie Marie and Riley, they used all three pads (and I added a "thousands" one) and took turns rolling to add more to the pads from the roll before.  This meant they had to swap sets of 10 out for 1 of the next place value up.  Even Savannah played, rolling a number and then counting out the appropriate number of "froggies" for her ones lily pad.

Pretty fun!!

CC Science Club: Chinese New Year

Yes, yes, this happened in January.  So sue me.  We use a book I picked up at the library, but you can also get it on Amazon.  For the January lesson, we talked about phase changes.  

First, we read a few books about the Chinese New Year.  Then we made a Venn Diagram about the differences and similarities between the Chinese and the American New Years.  The kids did really well! 

Next I did a demo by making poppers that were completely unsuccessful at the library (using off-brand alka-seltzer and water in an old-school film canister, which was really hard to find!) but worked at home.  It was supposed to tie in with the "Fireworks/explosions" portion of the Venn Diagram.  Next we separated into groups and showed how a liquid (vinegar) and a solid (baking soda) can produce a reaction in the form of a gas (carbon dioxide), which we could see by inflating a balloon over a soda bottle. 

Helpful hint: Use a paper cone to pour the baking soda into the balloon.  Measure the vinegar into the soda bottle, and then attach the balloon to the top of the bottle.  When you stand the balloon up, the baking soda goes in, but you've got all the time in the world to attach your balloon, unlike if you try to mix the elements and THEN put the balloon on top. 

Then it was time for snack and crafts!! The book (and my original plan) suggests doing mini egg rolls, but since there were supposed to be too many kids to have it at my house (fully 1/2 of the people who RSVP'd didn't come), we were at the library and I wasn't sure what our kitchen options were going to be, so we did popcorn (get it, it's popping/exploding?)

Then the kids worked on a really simple craft that I based on a Pinterest find. This was also a second choice, the first choice craft involved paint, which I decided was a bad idea at the library, but the kids seemed to enjoy making puppets, and they're younger, so this was good.

 We had a great time! The science club idea seems to work well for us and for our CC friends! I didn't take any pictures from our February club, which we had this week on Monday, but we did polymers using Teflon Tape and plastic bags.  We had fun learning we could stretch vertically and distort the images and then pull horizontally and realign the molecules! Our crafts were just fun heart-shaped foam activities from Michaels.  I had a bunch of events that all happened on the same day, so a CC friend greatly blessed me by saying she'd bring a craft.  I really didn't feel like I fit in our community at the beginning of the year (I still don't) but I've been very supported by

The Messy Letter Project

We've been working with the littler kids (and Riley) on letter recognition. We did shaving cream on construction paper for A/a and tonight was flour for B/b. They have done really well with it- they don't seem to get bored or frustrated if they're making a mess, and Savannah can even point out an A on a page!! Here's a little clip of tonight's messiness!! I'm thinking about something gooey for tomorrow night- maybe toothpaste? We'll see!