May Afterschool Report

"Regular" school finished up May 19 and we've been doing more unschooling types of learning at home -

Math - He learned to play Yahtzee. Although I do most of the adding, I let him do what he can and the rest I do out loud so he can see my thought processes. We have also begun practicing adding coins of different denomiations together. Previously, he has counted money of only the same denomination. We have also begun setting the stage for our summer (and hopefully continuing throughout the years) unit on money, using the KidsWealth program, which we are starting on June 1. More on this to come.

Music - We listened to Brahms Hungarian Dances in the car some. Samuel found my Fantasia 2000 DVD which I had totally forgotten about and watched that all the way through once and the Saint-Saens piece several more times. In March 2008, we had spent a month with this composer and piece of music, and he decided he wanted to do it again in June, so I've just requested all the materials from the library including a CD, a DVD concert, and Ogden Nash's ZOO for our poet since these poems are used in the DVD. Any ideas on other activities or books we should try?

Art - Art was a little ecletic this month also. Instead of me picking one artist, I checked out several books of artwork geared to children, including "Seen Art?" by Jon Scieszka (of Time Warp Trio fame); "I Spy a Lion:Animals in Art" by Lucy Micklethwait; and "Come Look With Me:Animals in Art" by Gladys Blizzard.

Literature and Poetry - We finished "Charlotte's Web" and "The Bill Martin Jr Big Book of Poetry"; we also read another book in the "Littles" series by John Peterson and began "The Llama Who Had No Pajama" by Mary Ann Hoberman for our new poetry book. Samuel really likes poetry. In this book, he found one poem that he just had to memorize:

Frog
Pollywiggle
Pollywog
Tadpole
Bullfrog
Leaps on
Long legs
Jug-o-rum
Jelly eggs
Sticky tongue
Tricks flies
Spied by
Flicker eyes
Wet skin
Cold blood
Squats in
Mucky mud
Leaps on
Long legs
Jug-o-rum
Jelly eggs
Laid in
Wet bog...
Pollywiggle
Pollywog

He says it in a sing-song way, but this is not easy to memorize.

Geography - we finished listening to "Paddle to the Sea" by Holling C. Holling. We also are trying to memorize the song in this video:

We've got the first verse pretty much down, but he's picked another hard one to memorize!

Nature Study - We finished reading "The Adventures of Grandfather Frog" by Thornton Burgess and began "The Adventures of Chatterer the Red Squirrel". I like these books because they are fun stories that teach something about the animals, but also help teach character. For instance, Grandfather Frog keeps getting into trouble because he thinks he already knows everything and doesn't need any help or advice from anyone. So we learn that being humble will help you out in life. We also made two trips to the zoo, the first one spent mostly observing the ducks (not an exhibit, just hanging out there) and the second one spent mostly in the bird house and penguin house. See a theme here?

The most exciting thing that happened was being able to observe a mourning dove nesting in the gutter that can be seen from Samuel's bedroom window. We also got to see the baby (called a squab) in the nest and hopping up the roof (with Mama watching from below and Papa watching from above) before they all flew off. Last year we knew there was a mourning dove nest in the tree outside our balcony, but we could never get a good look because of all the leaves. We were sad to lose our tree in the big ice storm that hit this winter and were afraid our mourning dove couple would find somewhere else. Fortunately we had a great view of their new home. We all felt bad because it hardly stopped raining during one of the nesting weeks, until we learned through some online research that they are also called Rain Doves! They are all gone from the nest now, although we still see them flying around the area occasionally.