The first class of the morning is based on the curriculum "Five in a row", the concept of which is to read a specific classic children's book everyday for a week and the curriculum gives you activities and experiments and topics to discuss that correlate with the story. Our first book was "The Story of Ping" by Marjorie Flack.
In the story, Ping is a little duck that lives in China on a "junk" on the Yangtze River. He doesn't pay attention and misses the master's call to return and makes the decision to stay behind rather than take his punishment which leads to some close calls!
So, in Gage's class, after they read the book they discussed why we should pay attention and then they also talked about ducks and rivers and how we use our local river for food, transportation etc.
Next, they did an experiment on buoyancy by guessing what items the teacher brought would float or sink by dropping them in a bucket of water. This was by far the highlight of Gage's day as his teacher had brought in a Lego man which Gage picked out to drop in the bucket! In fact, that evening we had to re-create the experiment at home in the bath tub! At least all his lego men are now clean!!
We also looked up China and specifically the Yangtze River on the map and made a Chinese stir fry together this week. Such a fun curriculum!
His next class is an Art/Spanish class, his teacher is from Colombia and has taught art for years and she incorporates Spanish words while teaching art. He learned "buenos dias", colors and several others that I am going to have to review later, LOL! She also told them about Picasso and their objective was to completely color a page to the edges that she had drawn. Of course, Gage wanted to draw his own, so he drew a shark!
I asked him afterward how much he liked his "school" to which he replied "my school is the bestest!!" So I would have to say it was a success! It also give me a couple of hours to update this blog ;-)
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