Wow! This week has really flown by and I need to catch you up on last week’s lessons. Since my last blog we have studied birthday traditions as well as the Easter story and how the Easter bunny and eggs became apart of the traditions. We learned about the spiritual ramifications of the Easter story and talked about how pagan traditions became intertwined with it. We found that in many cultures such as Egyptian and Roman that they would celebrate spring with festivals and rabbits and eggs were symbols of fertility and life. I also had them practice their note reading for music and read some poetry about springtime and had them write their own poems telling them that a poem is a word song with a heartbeat and can rhyme and describe something. We did our April calendar work and did a lot of math worksheets and music and moved on to the lesson the kids had been looking forward to all week- Kit Kat Fractions! I wrote the definitions to fraction, part, whole, denominator, numerator, and so on up on the board and the kids wrote their notes and then I gave Z1 and Z2 each a Kit Kat bar and told them to break them into their four equal parts. Z3 got to have one just because. I had Z1 and Z2 show me ¾ or ½ and after we used them for our fraction lessons I told Z2 pick up ¼ and eat it and told Z1 pick up ¾ and eat it until they had eaten the whole. It was the tastiest lesson we have had and they can’t wait to learn more about fractions. Later last week, we moved on to our science lesson Anatomy of Flowers. They learned about pollination and girl plants and boy plants and labeled diagrams and Z1 and Z2 learned that bees and wind are the two main contributors to pollination. This lesson we will continue on for a few weeks and my cousin to keeps bees among other things is going to teach them and demonstrate harvesting honey. We are all really excited about that. And until then we are going to do some seed starting. Monday was an exciting day as we gave our worksheets a rest and talked and took notes about the importance of storytelling and how our lives are made up of a bunch of stories all collected up into what makes us who we are. They each wrote a family story either old or new in their Wonder Journals and then Monday evening I took them to my alma mater to see a Nigerian storyteller and listen to his stories. Yesterday they wrote in their journals about it and I took a lot of great pictures for our book. Z3 and Z4 liked it a lot with the dancing and singing apart of the stories. I am pushing Z4 to learn all her body parts so if she has a “hurt” as she calls it then she can confirm where it is so I can fix it. Z3 thinks she is so big that when Z1 and Z2 are doing schoolwork she says she needs some work too and gets her favorite Numbers coloring book out and goes to work. The child can count to 20 and she colors like an artist and always picks up where she left off. Z4 says “I’na dwaw,” so we have to get her a coloring book or pages to draw on too so everyone will have some work to do. Here kids do some laundry!
