Heaps of learning!

We have had soooo many learning “encounters” lately that I am overwhelmed by even trying to post some of them!
We had a geography fair 2 weeks ago and our family learned all about Jamaica, which was the county we presented. Savannah and I had already done a unit study on Jamaica for the book How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World and learned its geographic location, nearby oceans, and major crops (sugar cane, bananas).
We honored Veteran’s Day by making a war timeline that outlined ALL of the major American wars. Savannah and I sat down by our trusty map of the world and discussed the countries involved and the oceans traveled. We talked about our relatives that have fought in wars. We discussed freedom, what a civil war means, the sadness of slavery, the way the colonist treated the Native Americans. We learned about Harriet Tubman and read a story about her. What a RICH time of learning the two of us had. Now, of course I left out A LOT of the horrors of war and slavery. Savannah will unfortunately learn about those when she is ready. But she got it, in an awesome way. She learned compassion for the slaves, for the Indians. She learned that some people were brave enough to fight for it to be ended, that some were brave enough to escape and help others do the same.

When we learned more in depth information about Jamaica for our geography fair, she already knew where slaves were taken from, what ocean they crossed, and now when she sees a Jamaican in the typical dread-lock image, she knows why most of them are black (Jamaica was the most slave dependant nation in the world due to their export of sugar cane). Liam got to hand pick the other crops that grow there from our kitchen toys. We served pineapple and coffee and sugar at the fair J. We played Bob Marley all week around the house.

Savannah glued and wrote a lot of what was on our board.
They got to tape down the coins for the currency exchange from the Jamaican money that a friend gave us.

Savannah colored her own Jamaican flag and we displayed it.

That night, the kids learned a few things about some other countries, too. We ate sushi (well, the adults did) from Japan, plantains from Africa, vegemite from Australia, you get the idea.

We have been reading The Story About Ping and have been discussing Chinese culture and geography. We have flipped though a Chinese art history book, a book about children from different cultures, the geography of China, etc.


We also, coincidentally have learned everything there is to know about the King Cobra, and how it lives in China. Makes me not want to go there.

Speaking of the king cobra, we have animal fact sheets that have a wealth of information on them about each specific animal, and as you can imagine, this is Liam’s favorite subject. As we read about the cobra, the great white shark, the Nile crocodile, the bald eagle, my hand becomes the carnivorous weapon of choice for the animal being discussed and we get very…very…very into the devouring tendencies of the animals. It sounds incredibly gory but the kids like it. We also learn where the animal lives in the world. Ask Liam where the Nile River is, what country it’s in, and he can show you and tell you who lives there that is “very very BAD!!!” with a very exaggerated “b” sound for the word “bad”.

On the great white shark front, we saw an omnidome feature “Wild Ocean” where Liam sat and waited patiently for the sharks to come around. We worked on our planets in the solar system knowledge and quized Savannah on the names of each of the models at the omniplex.

We checked out a book and discussed the history of thanksgiving, why it’s in the fall (which really hits home since we have our own harvest going on), what happened on the first thanksgiving, etc.

We have finished our Advent Calendar.

We celebrate Advent starting December 1st and it is a way for us to count down the days and commemorate Christ’s birth through various activities. So while we used to just put up the Christmas tree and be done, the activity of putting up a Christmas tree is on our advent calendar for tonight and we will all do it together and read a lesson on the history of the Christmas tree and its origins. We will do the same for many of the typical traditions of Christmas. We will intentionally be giving more to under privileged families and we let the kids in on this in a big way, every year. I’ll be posting more of our advent celebrations on here soon.

Savannah has been working on addition, penmanship of lower case letters and also numbers, spelling, the usual.
Sorry this was long winded. It was basically a synopsis of what we’ve been up to the past few weeks (with a lot missing). There are some of you out there who really do want to keep up with everything we are doing, so there you go J. For me, I will treasure remembering all of this when my kids are grown and gone, so thanks for bearing with me through this loooong blog post.

Oh, and I almost forgot about Felicity’s learning encounters! The word for her lately is “roll”. She is now rolling to get where she wants and has developed even more rolls of chub ; )