4-H Cultural Awareness/Asian Adventure

Our latest 4-H theme was cultural awareness, and we started by visiting The Newark Museum for their Asian Awareness guided tour.  Our tour guide was AMAZING!  She had just the right touch of firmness to keep the group under control and moving along.

We started with Japan, when our tour guide put on a beautiful kimono…..

 

 

and we saw an exhibit of beautiful carves cases, and ornaments (called Netsuke when worn from the obi, or belt for the kimono).

In the China exhibits, we saw a beautiful garden carved from semi-precious stones and metal.

We moved onto the Southeast Asia exhibits, where George was fascinated by the Dharmachakra or Wheel of Law (from Thailand)….

 

and a statue of the Hindu God, Ganesha.

The museum has a Buddhist temple that was Consecrated by the fourteenth Dalai Lama.   Our tour guide explained to the kids about being respectful, about the different types of offerings (offerings are intended to be pleasing to the five senses and would include food, flowers, incense, lamps and music).

Next we visited the Look/Touch/Learn: Tibet exhibit.   The exhibit features a mural (by Tibetan Artist Phuntsok Dorje (that depicts various aspects of life in Tibet).

The kids were able to check out a small Tibetan tent…

play a pretend tea ceremony…..

and spin a Buddhist prayer wheel.

After our official tour was over, we checked out a bunch of the other exhibits, including the Egyptian…

the Native American….

the Dynamic Earth, which was full of interactive exhibits and games….

  

Generation Fit, another interactive exhibits with exercise equipment, health information, and Just Dance!

   

We finished up with a visit to the Fire Museum, which featured an interactive exhibit where the kids searched for fire hazards, learned what to do to escape a fire, saw the actual results of a fire on some vinyl siding.  In addition, there was historic protective clothing, equipment, illustrations and memorabilia, an 1853 Fire Hose Cart built for the Neptune Hose Company No. 1 of Newark, and a piece of the World Trade Center to honor the NJ Firefighters who assisted on 9/11.

 

The Museum was a great place to visit.  I can’t believe we are less than an hour away and have never visited before.  We will be going back again (actually this month to visit the planetarium) to further explore.

If you live in the area or are visiting NJ, check out The Newark Museum.  I highly recommend it!

 

When we met at the library, we learned more about Japan, India and China. 

First we discussed some of the various holidays they celebrated in those countries, that we don’t celebrate.  We learned about Children’s Day and Doll’s Day in Japan, Chinese New Year in China (and learned which animal each of the kids are in the Chinese Zodiac), and Diwali and Holi in India.

We learned how to say Hello in the primary language of each country (konnichi wa – Japan, Nin Hao – China, Namaste – India).

We discussed how chopsticks were used to eat in China and Japan, and the kids tried picking up pompoms using chopsticks.

For the first time I utilized the overhead projector and the kids danced to Katti Kalandal – the Bollywood style dance in Just Dance 2. (I tried to find something more authentic but most were not appropriate for children).

We talked about Rangoli, the traditional Indian folk art designs that are displayed on the floor of the house near the doorway to welcome guests and celebrate special events.  Rangoli are usually symmetrical designs made with colored rice powder, but we made ours out of fuse beads (and not so symmetrical).  

Our next 4-H topic (for July, this post is really late), is Space and will include a visit to the planetarium at the Newark Museum.

New Jersey: Thomas Edison

I just realized I never actually wrote a post about our trip to Thomas Edison’s Laboratory complex in West Orange, NJ.    We went there as part of our US States study, specifically New Jersey, our home state. 

We started out by reading about Thomas Edison in a few books.  All of our general New Jersey books had a section on Thomas Edison, and we read Thomas Edison: Inventor with a Lot of Bright Ideas.

Our visit to the laboratory complex was fun, but I think the kids will appreciate it more in a few years.    We did get to hear an early phonograph, and take a quick guided tour of the Chemistry lab. 

There was an I Spy checklist the kids used to find things, which helped keep their interest for a little while.

The time clock where Edison and his employees punched in every day.

Thomas Edison’s desk in the library.

The machine shop..

The old elevator…

the photo department with the early fire extinguisher..

the music room….

 

Looking at all that glass, I can understand why the Ranger made our tour of the Chemistry lab a quick one.

The Black Maria, the first film studio.  It was built on a track so the whole building could rotate and utilize the sunlight.

After our visit, we came home and explored the website for the park.   The kids were most interested in the games but it was also a good review of our visit.

US Geography – New Jersey (part 1 of ???)

Since we are finally getting some decent weather and the field trip possibilities are looking bright, I decided to go ahead and start our study of New Jersey.  This is the first state we are covering as we learn about US Geography.  We are starting with NJ because it’s where we live and we will be spending the most time on it.

We started by finding New Jersey on our US street map and highlighting it.   We noted how NJ is found in the Northeast region, and the Mid-Atlantic sub-region.

We then moved over to our large New Jersey map where we noted some of the feature of our state.  We are surrounded on three sides by water, making us a peninsula.    The Hudson river divides the Northeastern part of the state from New York, then the rest of the eastern half is on the Atlantic Ocean.  As you round the tip you enter the Delaware Bay, which narrows into the Delaware River, which separates New Jersey from Pennsylvania.

I asked George if he remembered when we went rafting on the Delaware River and he didn’t.  When I looked up the pictures, I realized why – it was 3 years ago.  (that trip can be seen here)

We marked our house, Grammy Kaye and Pop-pop Hugh’s house, Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Kathy’s house and Granny Franny and Pop-pop Nelson’s house on the map.  Since George knows it takes 2 1/2 hours to get to Granny Franny’s that gave him an idea of how large (or not) the state is.

We read NJ Facts and Symbols and learned some basic information about our state.  After, I had George look through the book to tell me what information to add to our Fact Poster.  We will continue to add to this as we learn more.

I’m not sure how long our New Jersey study will take.  I have to take advantage of living in a state where you can drive from one end to the other in a day, so we will be doing lots of field trips as we learn about the history, the land, and the people of our state.

Weekly Wrap-up

We had a full and busy week.  I’ve been going through my school files, pulling out things that both kids are beyond (to pass on to others), and finding those things that I used for Georgie that would now be good for Vicki.  I need to find more things for her to do independently while I work with Georgie.  Things that count as “school” in her mind.

Among the latter, I found some file folder games that Vicki had a chance to try this week.  The first, Dino Bones, is from File Folder fun.  When I printed this off for Georgie, I used the blank bones to make bones with just +0 and +1 equations.  Vicki can now handle some slightly harder problems, so I may print out some extra bones for her. 

Another math game she played was one I made up for Georgie when he was learning to count higher than 10.  It involves matching smiley faces to the correct numbers.  Vicki liked this for a while but had trouble with the higher numbers.  She felt the smiley faces were too small and used her magnifying glass to help see them better.

Vicki has been counting to 100 lately, so I pulled out a 100’s chart for her to count along with so she could get more familiar with how the numbers look and the patterns.  For some reason,whenever she counts, she does the 80’s and 90’s in a Southern accent.  I plan to use this for some games as well.

She is continuing with her Evan Moor Skill Sharpeners Math, Kindergarten.  These are pretty easy for her but she likes them and they include practice in counting, graphing, addition, coins, and patterns.

The Evan Moor Daily Math Practice, 1st Grade is starting to get harder.  She is still able to answer at least 3 of the 5 “daily” problems, sometimes more, but the addition problems especially are getting harder.  After I told her 3+5 = 8, she was able to figure out that to answer 3+4 “you skip down one, so 7”.    If these get much more difficult, I may stop using them.

I redid Vicki’s office board this week to update it for what she’s currently doing.  I removed her full name (because it was just confusing her) and just put an example of Vicki with HWT type lines.  I replaced her alphabet and numbers with a 100’s chart (with the 2s and 5s circled in different colors) and a word wall, and added a picture to show the difference between d and b (something she does struggle with), and the full Handwriting without Tears alphabet and number guide.

As she learns word families, I will give her some sample words on post-its.  When she reads them to me, she can hang them on her word wall.  After a few days (before the next batch), I’m writing the words in and removing the post-its (since they kept falling off).

She’s been a little reluctant to work on other phonics this week but she did play a fishing for words game, consisting of a magnet tied to string and laminated paper fish with paperclips taped to the back.

Handwriting is probably what went best this week for the little girl.  She is enjoying the lined chalkboard from Handwriting without Tears, playing wet/dry/try, and she wrote her name this week.  Not exactly on the lines but pretty close.

She has finished all the letters in the Pre-K book and will move on to the Kindergarten book as soon as we go through numbers.

Georgie seems to have only two modes when it comes to math - “Why are you giving me baby questions?” and “How am I supposed to know THAT?”  The latter often becomes the former if he slows down long enough to read the directions or listen to an explanation.  But, he did have a few challenges this week.

His Algebra Readiness Made Easy is still going well despite having moved on to the Grade 3 book.  These are one of the few things he is able to do almost completely on his own right now.

In Math Mammoth we covered:
     Fractions – too easy
     Time to the minute – tortuous, he seems to have forgotten everything about telling time to the 5 minutes.  Time to pull out the Lotto game again. 
     Graphing – evidently we’ve never done this before.  He had some trouble at first and I think I will need to find some extra practice pages.
     Place Value – too easy, we’re done with this for now.   MM doesn’t touch on this again until 4A.
     Money – I think I’m going to stop MM and just working on making change using the cash register, and playing games.  I printed off some worksheets from another Scholastic ebook – Instant and Interactive Math Picture Pages with Activities.  This week I gave him an Autumn themed activity, which worked mainly on addition (still working on getting him faster with his facts), but we then used the page to play some store.  He used crayons to represent the various items.

Georgie had a lot of fun trying to give me math problems that I couldn’t solve.  Since he usually repeated numbers in his problems, like 100+100+32+32 or 1 million + 56 + 56, they weren’t too hard.  I told him how I was solving them and he seemed to find it interesting.

We finished up the triangle chapter in Beast Academy 3A this week.  I can’t tell if he likes this or hates it.

I’m very happy with his reading these days.  I started reading to the kids at night and two nights in a row, I read a few Chapters from a Magic Tree House book and Georgie finished that book and read an additional one.  In two nights he read, Night of the Ninjas, Vacation Under A Volcano, Mummies in the Morning (which he was disappointed there was only one mummy and it didn’t even walk around), and Pirates Past Noon.  I hope this is the start of a new trend of him reading more on his own.

All his Reading Comprehension activities this week were from Evan Moor Read and Understand with Leveled Texts, Grade 3.  He didn’t have any difficulty with the actual reading or the vocabulary activities.   One of this weeks assignments – When Granny Met Johnny Appleseed – had an activity on similes, which came up again in his Spectrum Writing workbook.  He seems to have the basic idea down but, as usual, doesn’t like to keep things simple.  He had to complete his own similes as part of both lessons. 

His selections from reading comprehension:

   -As big as “a gorilla” – okay pretty normal.
   -As cold as “the nice chill of the penguins” – getting a little odd.
   -As old as “grandfather owl with his kid telling a story”

In his Spectrum, we ended up with:

-Little sister cried like “a hard storm” and
-My doll is as “boring as a toy boat that doesn’t float”.

I told him he could keep them shorter but he said he was “making them interesting”.

The rest of Spectrum Writing this week was describing words.  Georgie willingly did some of the writing on his own.  He decided to use symbols instead of actual words, but it’s some progress.

I decided to move a little faster in All About Spelling 2 until he starts having trouble.  We went through the rules and words for Steps 4, 5, 6 and 7 this week.  We will review some of the extra words, then move on next week.

Also this week:

We learned about Washington DC and the symbols of the United States.

We went to the Pumpkin Patch…

and decorated our pumpkins.

Last weekend, we joined Stephanie at college for Homecoming Day.