On Monday I am starting a block of the Four Processes. We have touched on these basic ideas before with the royal math family, but now we'll dive into a block of two to three weeks of just the four processes. I am going to play it by ear and see how long we need to make this block (also, if the weather warms up above 20 degrees, we are going to just put the books away and get outside, since it has been hard to get outside for very long (sometimes not at all) during these terribly cold temps.
The story I am starting out with is of Miss Mary, her friend Jolly John (I am paying homage to a local car dealer with this borrowed name), and their four children. As you can see by the picture, I will be focusing on different ways to make the number eight using the four processes. After we master the number eight, I'll move up to ten, then twelve, then I'll skip ahead to twenty.
I also plan to revisit the "Qualities of Numbers". We had gone over the qualities of numbers from zero to ten back in September, so it will be mainly a review to revisit them again only this time I'll add in twelve and twenty.
We finished our study of the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with all of us snuggled in to watch the Disney film, munching on a big bowl of popcorn (we love adding olive oil to our air-popped popcorn instead of butter, sprinkled with some sea salt and nutritional yeast.) I'll be bringing the seven dwarfs back into our thinking as we work on the qualities of numbers/four processes - adding the seven dwarfs and Snow White to create eight happy people in the cabin in the woods.
For Social Studies, we discussed Martin Luther King Jr. a bit in preparation for the celebration of his birthday this month. I am often amused and heartened by the reaction of my son when I mention that Martin Luther King Jr. fought for equality of people. My son simply does not "get" that anyone would treat anyone else any differently for any reason. I simply left him with the concept (without getting into too much depth) and am allowing him to take the concept inside of himself and process it at his own pace. I am not sure if it makes a lot of sense to him right now, and I am not going to force the issue with him. I guess he will discover all too soon that some people are cruel. He seems to understand that the "bad guys" in the fairy tales are cruel for no good reason, and so I explained to him that Martin Luther King Jr. was against being cruel to other people like the villains in the stories we read. That seemed to be sufficient for him, so I've left it at that for now.
Next week we will move from Snow White (except for the math block cameo appearance) and onto Rapunzel. You can find a version of the story here on youtube. A quick search online can yield several versions of the fairy tale that you can choose from to tell your own version of the story. I prefer not to include as much violence as Grimm suggests, which I realize is a matter of personal preference. My son gets scared when a story has too much suspense and/or violence.
I will put on a puppet show to describe the story, and of course I will create a chalkboard drawing first to entice interest in the story and to allow the imagination to wonder about it first. After the second telling of the story, I'll have my son retell the story. I'm still formulating in my mind other activities to go along with this story, but in keeping with the fun we had this past week with Snow White as we watched the Disney film, we can watch the above video on youtube as well as Tangled
and then compare the two stories.
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