When we got into the school room, we did a lot of skip counting review with movement and our "times tables tunes". All the good stuff we've been doing over the past couple weeks.
After that we did our penny whistle lesson, and then I told Grant a story about the Portuguese cod fishing boats, also known as dories (In Marsh Johnson's waldorf home educators files, where I got the idea for this lesson, she recommends talking about the medieval cod fisherman, but I couldn't find much information about them online. There was plenty of info about the Portuguese fisherman from the early part of the 20th century, so I went with that. It was still really interesting, and got the same idea across.)
You can read more about the Portuguese Dory boats here. You can watch a series of short videos from a National Geographic documentary about it here.
These were some hard working dudes! Gone from their homes to fish 4-6 months of the year. In a one man dory boat (made of wooden planks about 16 feet long) in the Atlantic ocean for 12 hours a day! Then, once they filled their dory with fish, they had to go back to the schooner (which was the larger ship that carried all the men and dories), and clean and salt all the fish. Only when their ship was full to capacity could they return home. This was some seriously dangerous work! Grant thought it sounded like fun to live on a boat so long. If only he knew!! The above videos are really pretty interesting to watch.
We also talked about how plentiful the cod used to be in the Great Banks region of Newfoundland, and around the coasts of Greenland. It was said that you could dip a basket into the water and come out with a basket full of fish, and that at times the water was so thick with fish, you could hardly row your boat through them.
After I told Grant the story, we drew pictures in our lesson books.
Mom's Drawing
Grant's Drawing
We looked at this picture of a cod fish, so we could get a good sense of what they look like:
Once we were done with our drawings, we worked on some math problems using our "jewels" as fish. We started with counting them out by 2's and then by 5's. After that, I had Grant start with a big pile of jewel "fish". I told him only 10 fish could fit in the hold of each boat. He divided up the fish into piles of ten, and then we counted by 10's to see how many there were. In in this case we had 7 piles of 10 and 8 fish left over. I also showed him how that was 7x10. After that I took a few fish out of our pile, and told him each boat could now only hold four fish. He divided the fish into piles of four, and then counted by 4's to see how many there were. This time he had 15 piles of 4 fish, with 1 left over. So, we had a total of 61 fish. Then I showed him that 4x15 was also the same answer.
We worked on our knitting projects in the afternoon, and for dinner we had fish nuggets, made out of guess what?? Cod!! We have had these many times before, and the kids love them!
On Tuesday, we started out with outdoor playtime and our walk. Only about 2 inches of snow accumulated because of the ground being warm. If not, we would have had around 8-10 inches of snow. After our walk, we went into the school room and reviewed the time's tables with movement and songs. I also introduced Grant to the 9's times table. After the math review, we did our penny whistle lesson, and then I read the kids this fun book for St. Patrick's Day:
After that I had Grant re-tell me the story I told him yesterday about the Portuguese Cod Fishermen. After we had talked about the story once again, we wrote out the times tables for the 2's, 3's, 4's and 5's.
Grant also worked out some multiplication problems on his chalkboard.
On Wednesday, the kids enjoyed some morning playtime in the sunshine before we went into the school room. Once inside we reviewed the times tables with their tunes, marched out the 9's and 11's times tables, and I gave Grant a stack of cards with the 9's times tables written on it. I asked him to go as fast as he could to put them in the correct order. At first he thought it would take him forever, but he quickly got the hang of it.
After that we did our penny whistle lesson. Once we were done with the penny whistle lesson, Grant wrote out the 6's and 7's times tables, and I showed Grant how to multiply in columns.
I also introduced Grant to the concept of greater than, less than, or =.
After we talked about that for awhile, I read the kid's this book:
And then I read them a fun leprechaun trickster story out of this book:
Once I had read the stories, we made these pots of gold sun catchers.
This one is Julia's:
On Thursday, we reviewed the times tables with movement, songs and jump roping.
We also changed up the star count game from the Games For Math book a little bit. The first roll of the dice was supposed to be the number of "baskets" we would draw, and the second roll was supposed to be the number of fish inside the basket. Grant decided he wanted to draw pots with pieces of gold inside.
We each had two turns, and Grant figured out how many total pieces of gold were in each "set" of pots.
Afterward, Grant finished writing the times tables. He wrote out the 8's, 9's 10's and 11's tables.
When he finished with that, we worked on some more multiplication problems and reviewed greater than,less than, or =.
Once we were done with math, I read the kids this book:
We also did some fun things for St. Patrick's Day, but I'll write about that in a different post.
Next week will be our fourth and final week for our watercraft of the world math block. We will be reviewing division while talking about the Chinook Canoe and the Inuit Kayak.
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