Saturday, December 28, 2024

The Gyrator and the Weather Tree

Zac and I are celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas with a gift or special activity each day.

In the morning he reads the riddle that I write and put in the middle of the ring, and uses the clues to find a hidden present or note about what we are doing. As the years go by, the riddles have gotten harder and harder!

Yesterday he got to make a lantern, and in the evening we got together with friends and did a Lantern Walk and a Solstice Spiral. It was a beautiful night, and a favorite way to celebrate the cycle of the seasons.

He made the lantern using the instructions I typed up a few years back: What Do You Do with Old Birthday Candles?

It was quick and came out really well. Then when we lit the candle inside, we discovered that the wings glowed in the light!

I got lots of other ideas on that Lantern Walk as well. One friend adhered dried Autumn leaves to the outside of her lantern, over the tissue paper base, and it was beautiful! Another covered her jar in salt, which sparkled!

I just love to see all the little lights bobbing along as people walk through the nighttime forest!


This year we also celebrated the Winter Solstice by visiting the Gyrator sculpture (behind Giant City Lodge) for the first time. I was so excited! This sculpture has a circular cutout through which the sun's rays pass at solar noon (here are the times for Makanda IL). On the Equinoxes and Solstices, the beam of light lands perfectly on a bronze plaque on the ground.

There also a ring at the top of the sculpture, through which you can always see the North Star.

http://www.vectortheartoffabricating.com/1990-gyrator-by-stephen-luecking/


The Shortest Day
by Susan Cooper

I had been wanting to go for years, ever since my friend Trish told me about it, and this year we finally did! The Gyrator would make a great field trip for the next time I teach about Astronomy.


There are a few more special seasonal traditions I'm looking forward to! On New Year's Eve, we do ceromancy with the Fortune-Telling with Wax - New Year's Activity Kit from A Toy Garden. It's really fun to pour the melted wax in cold water and see the shape it takes as it hardens. Is it a mushroom? Is it a bird? Then you use the little booklet to decode your future.

https://atoygarden.com/products/fortune-telling-with-wax-new-years-activity-kit


On New Year's Day, we set up the Weather Tree (PDF) from All Year Round: A Calendar of Celebrations. We did this for the first time back in 2007! In the past we have always done the little kid version of this, where we colored in a leaf based on the weather (snow, rain, sun, etc).


But now that Zac is in Third Grade, and Measurement is our big Math focus, I think I'd like to do it with Temperature.

Reading a thermometer is the hardest of all the measurement tools, since each one can have a different scale. That's not true with clocks or rulers! So it takes a TON of practice.

It would be super easy to check the temperature every day at noon (we do that anyway, before we go out to recess!) and have the color key represent ranges of numbers instead. That would help the third graders practice reading a thermometer; a different child could be in charge of it each day.

There are seven leaves in the key, so we could have seven temperature colors, and then just leave it white if it's below freezing.

    32 or lower - white
    33-39 - silver
    40-49 - purple
    50-59 - blue
    60-69 - green
    70-79 - yellow
    80-89 - orange
    90 or higher - red


I could also write the actual temperature in my plan book each day, so that we could then find the average temperature for each month. When I student taught at the Campus School of Smith College, Mrs. Szymaszek kept a list of the daily temps and the children calculated the average every month and graphed it. In Waldorf, finding averages (mean, median, mode, and range) is part of the 6th grade Business Math block... as is making and reading a graph. So that could be a special job for the older children!


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Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Joyce Sidman's Science + Poetry

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I survive by listmaking.

I constantly have a million teaching ideas pinging around in my head, and it's imperative that I put them down on paper; otherwise, I wouldn't be able to get to sleep at night. I also teach nearly every subject and nearly every grade, and so I need to have teaching notes ready for almost anything.

When I was making my Distraction of Prefixes post, and looking up quintain (a jousting term), I saw in the lower corner of my computer screen that quintain is also a poetry term. I immediately thought of Joyce Sidman, who loves to play with many different poetic forms.

In searching through all her poetry books in hopes of finding an example of a quintain, I re-remembered how much amazing Science information she puts in with her Poetry. For example, I found a poem about the Painted Turtle hibernating below the mud... which would have been perfect for when we did that chapter in our Advent book, All Creation Waits. I wish I'd known!

click to enlarge

So...

It is time for a list. Here are the poem titles and the science notes that accompany them.


Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature's Survivors

perfect for the Timeline of Life (Montessori Second Great Lesson)
scale for timeline on endpapers: 1 cm = 1 million years

First Life (a diamante) - bacteria

The Mollusk That Made You - mollusk

The Lichen We - lichen

untitled - shark

Scarab - beetle

Diatoms - diatoms

Gecko on the Wall - gecko

The Ants - ant

Grass - grass

Tail Tale - squirrel

Crow - crow

Fluff Head - dandelion

Come with Us - coyote

Baby - human


Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night

Welcome to the Night - raccoon

Snail at Moonrise - woodland snail

Love Poem of the Primrose Moth - primrose moth

Dark Emperor - great horned owl

Oak After Dark - tree

Night-Spider's Advice - orb spider

I Am a Baby Porcupette - porcupine

Cricket Speaks - cricket

The Mushrooms Come - mushroom

Ballad of the Wandering Eft - red eft / red-spotted newt

Bat Wraps Up - tree bat

Moon's Lament (an ubi sunt) - moon


Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow

In the Almost-Light - dew

Morning Warming - grasshopper

Shhh! They Are Sleeping - rabbit

He - fox

Bubble Song - spittlebug

Sap Song - xylem & phloem

Heavenly - milkweed

Ultraviolet - butterfly

Letter to the Sun

Letter to the Rain

Peel Deal - snake

Don't I Look Delicious? - toad

Always Together - goldfinch

An Apology to My Prey - red-tailed hawk

The Gray Ones - deer

We Are Waiting (a pantoum) - trees


Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems

Listen for Me - spring peeper

Spring Splashdown - wood duck

Diving Beetle's Food-Sharing Rules - predaceous diving beetle

Fly, Dragonfly! - green darner

In the Depths of the Summer Pond - food chain

A Small Green Riddle - duckweed

Aquatic Fashion - caddis fly

Song of the Water Boatman
and Backswimmer's Refrain - water boatman, backswimmer

Travel Time - water bear / tardigrade

The Season's Campaign - cattails

Into the Mud - painted turtle


Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold

Dream of the Tundra Swan - tundra swan

Snake's Lullaby - garter snake

Snowflake Wakes - snowflake

Big Brown Moose - moose

Winter Bees - honeybee

Under Ice (a pantoum) - beaver

Brother Raven, Sister Wolf - raven, wolf

Vole in Winter - vole

What Do the Trees Know? - trees

Chickadees's Song - chickadee

The Whole World Is Melting - springtail

Triolet for Skunk Cabbage - skunk cabbage


That is all I have so far. When the library reopens after Boxing Day, I can go check and see what Francine has. I know I'm missing the following titles:

Hello, Earth! Poems to Our Planet
Just Us Two: Poems About Animal Dads
Eureka! Poems About Inventors



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A Distraction of Prefixes

Zac's current bedtime story is Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray (1943 Newbery winner). Yesterday I ran across a word I didn't know: quintain. A jousting term, it clearly comes from the Latin word for five.

So this got me thinking about prefixes, and distracted me from what I'm supposed to be doing (which is wrapping Christmas presents). When we do the Infinity Street lesson in the grade 2 Column Algorithms & Place Value block, I always have to cover lots of number prefixes. It would be nice to have a list of related words that I could refer to, organized and ready to go.


Introducing the Equals Sign ("Is the Same As") and Infinity


We have houses and mailboxes up to septillion, and slips of paper with the names of all of the families up to novemdecillion

    Simple
    Thousand
    Million
    Billion
    Trillion
    Quadrillion
    Quintillion
    Sextillion
    Septillion
    Octillion
    Nonillion
    Decillion
    Undecillion
    Duodecillion
    Tredecillion
    Quattuordecillion
    Quindecillion
    Sexdecillion
    Septendecillion
    Octodecillion
    Novemdecillion


I like to give them the slips of paper after septillion and have them figure out how to put them in order! When it comes to talking through the prefixes, you can refer to the months of the year as a way to help but this can get surprisingly tricky since September is no longer month #7, October is no longer month #8, etc. I remember finding this irritating when I was a child!

They find out the reason for this in grade 3 Clocks & Calendars, so you can plant the seeds of, "I wonder..."

I have actually found Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin by Lloyd Moss to be extremely useful, especially for clarifying that the word is < sext > and not < sex > when representing six (trio, quartet, quintet, sextet, septet, octet, nonet).


Here is what I have so far, and I'd be happy to add your suggestions:

Million

    'milli' means a thousand; a million is a thousand thousands

    millimeter, milliliter, milligram

    millipede

    millefiori (in glasswork)


Billion


Trillion


Quadrillion

    4

    quadriceps

    quadriplegic

    quadrilateral

    quadrangle (in architecture)

    quadrant (in coordinate graphing)

    quadruple

    quadruplet
    It's So Amazing!, p.55


Quintillion


Sextillion


Septillion


Octillion


Nonillion


Decillion


Actually, having gone all the way through this list several times, I think I'm changing my mind about these being prefixes. The shared word part in so many of these numbers is < -illion >, which seems to be acting as a suffix.

Which means that bi, tri, quadr, quint, sext, sept, oct, non, and dec are bases and not prefixes here? Could these be compound words? I wonder...

In quintet, sextet, septet, octet, and nonet, < -et > is very clearly a suffix!

If < -et > is a suffix, then < quint > is a base, i.e. quint + et ----> quintet

Etymonline describes < bi- > simply as a "word-forming element." Hmm.


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Monday, December 23, 2024

The Benefits of Learning How to Wrap Presents!

Zac, age 4


The year Zac was 4, I got him a measuring tape for Christmas and he eagerly measured everything in sight! Measurement is fun!

Measurement is also hard, when you're doing it for real and not for pretend, and it requires a lot of practice. It's the math focus in the Waldorf curriculum for children age 9, and we've been doing many real life measurement projects lately to help them get lots of authentic practice using these skills.


April 2024

Planting a Three Sisters Garden
using Native American Gardening by Michael Caduto & Joseph Bruchac

all my notes are here


May 2024

Building a Cob Oven
using Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer

all my notes are here


March 2025
Planting a Dye Garden
using A Dyer's Garden by Rita Buchanan

Building a Pipe Loom
using Kids Weaving by Sarah Swett


May 2025

Building a House
using Housebuilding for Children by Lester Walker

These projects have been on my bucket list for 20 years! Finally, I set aside the time to do them instead of just looking longingly at the book covers.


Of course, you don't have to do something as ambitious as build a working heddle loom out of PVC pipe to do measurement with your child!


You can simply teach them how to wrap their own Christmas presents!

Stuffing something in a gift bag with a bit of tissue paper is NOT wrapping.
If something is round, or an odd shape, put it in a box and wrap the box! There are a surprising number of skills involved in wrapping a present, and Waldorf Handwork Educators wrote a lovely post about it.

Yes, it takes time. It took two adults (me and Cody) several hours on Tuesday to help 11 children wrap their parent gifts. But it is so worth it!!

Speaking of WHE, I am really excited for their upcoming Feb conference! The theme is Growing Together: The Power of Community Handwork. This includes class-wide and school-wide handwork projects, as well as those that are open to the whole community. Because I teach in a mixed-age environment, I love the idea of creating group projects that work for all ages. Many thanks to WHE for giving me a scholarship so that I can attend!


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Saturday, December 14, 2024

Christmas Movies

I've been keeping a list of all Zac's bedtime chapter books from age 3 up. They're at the bottom of the Kindy & Bridge page on my website.

Once he was old enough for TV shows and movies, I added those in as well!

Zac hasn't had much screen time and is extremely sensitive to peril. He also hates the big-eye animation style of modern-day Disney; he finds it scary. The golden age of movies from Zac's point of view was the 1940s - 1970s.

Currently we are watching vintage Paddington Bear episodes from the 70's and the documentary series Tudor Monastery Farm.


I've found it works well to introduce two new Christmas movies each year. They are getting gradually more intense as he gets older. As of right now, The Bishop's Wife is still his favorite Christmas movie because of the special effects (it was his very first encounter with movie special effects).


If you are in a neeed of an abbreviated version of A Christmas Carol, which you can read with your child, I highly recommend A CHRISTMAS CAROL for CHILDREN to READ OUTLOUD (PDF), which is somewhat simplified and greatly condensed. No words have been added, they are all Dickens himself!

And it is written as a script, so you could even perform it with your family!


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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Morse Code

In the past, I've used several resources to teach about Morse Code (we usually do Samuel Morse in our grade 2 Famous Inventors block). I have Samuel Morse, That's Who! The Story of the Telegraph and Morse Code by Tracy Nelson Maurer, a handy set of Morse Code Flashcards, and a wonderful collection of vintage telegrams.


And there's a good illustration of telegraph lines snaking across the country in Locomotive by Brian Floca.


There is a BIG difference, however, between teaching about the concept of Morse Code and learning Morse Code. I'm determined to learn it.

I well remember sitting in the living room, reading the encyclopedia, and memorizing the two letter postal abbreviations of all 50 states when I was a child (just for fun), and learning the International Radio Phonetic Alphabet when I was in my 30s (just for fun), and now I want to learn Morse Code.

For Spy Science, Morse is our final cipher (it's actually technically a cipher and not a code). The plan is to introduce it on the last Science Club before Winter Break and then to have a Morse Message of the Day up on the board for the children to decode at the start of Science Club each meeting in 2025.

My New Year's Resolution is now everyone's New Year's Resolution!


So now we come to the tricky part. How to learn it? For this, I am turning to Cheaper by the Dozen and the inimitable Frank Gilbreth. Efficiency expert par excellence, he not only turned learning this into a game for his children, he came up with an excellent way to memorize each letter!

You can find this section of the book by printing pages 73-74 of this PDF.

For tomorrow's Science Club, we will talk about the idea of short and long -- dots and dashes -- and explore it in several ways. When the telegraph was invented, people assumed they would have to look at the printout to see the dots and dashes, but the operators actually realized almost immediately that they could just do it by ear as the machine was chittering away.

So I think that doing this with sounds is going to be the best way to learn it.

1 - look at Morse Code Flashcards

2 - demonstration by Ms. Kamea, our tap dancer special guest

3 - tell the children how to spell each of their names in Morse Code

4 - read relevant section of Cheaper by the Dozen

5 - work on creating our own alphabet based on Gilbreth's method (a student who plays the viola has volunteered to play the patterns for each letter so we can listen and try to think of words that have the same pattern)

The only ones given in the book are the first four:

    A, a-BOUT
    dot dash

    B, BOI-ster-ous-ly
    dash dot dot dot

    C, CARE-less CHIL-dren
    dash dot dash dot

    D, DAN-ger-ous
    dash dot dot

I'm really looking forward to this!!! I also found a few letter ideas here.


UPDATE: Here is what we have come up with. The children did a great job!!!

    E, one dot (memorize)

    F, fab-ri-CA-tion
    dot dot dash dot

    G, GO GADG-et
    dash dash dot

    H, four dots (memorize)

    I, two dots (memorize)

    J, en-JOY JILL'S JAM
    dot dash dash dash

    K, KAI-a CALLS
    dash dot dash

    L, li-NO-le-um
    dot dash dot dot
    credited to preraphaelite

    M, MY MY
    dash dash
    credited to preraphaelite

    N, NEP-tune
    dash dot

    O, OW! OW! OW!
    dash dash dash

    P, pre-TEND PRIN-cess
    dot dash dash dot
    credited to off_coloratura

    Q, QUEENS QUICK-ly QUARREL
    dash dash dot dash

    R, ram-BUNC-tious
    dot dash dot
    credited to derspatchel

    S, three dots (memorize)

    T, TREE
    dash

    U, un-se-CURED
    dot dot dash

    V, va-va-va-VOOM
    dot dot dot dash
    credited to off_coloratura

    W, a-WARD WINGS
    dot dash dash

    X, X-ray ma-CHINE
    dash dot dot dash

    Y, YEL-low YO YO
    dash dot dash dash

    Z, ZIP ZEST-ful-ly
    dash dash dot dot


dictionary.com and howmanysyllables.com are useful for this exercise!

GO GADG-et and YEL-low YO YO are also mentioned on the derspatchel site, but the kids came up with those on their own so I'm giving them the credit.

We think that "e" is one dot because it's the most frequent letter and that would be the shortest to tap out. There are three other letters that are all dots. We have to memorize them because there is no such thing in English as a word without any stresses. Luckily for us, in order they spell "ish."


Note: We will not cover the wireless telegraph tomorrow, but I do have some resources for the next time it comes up (usually in the context of Titanic).

Expedition To Salvage Titanic's Wireless Telegraph Gets The Go-Ahead
NPR - May 20, 2020

Titanic, Marconi and the wireless telegraph


Guglielmo Marconi and Radio (Science Discoveries) by Steve Parker


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Sunday, December 8, 2024

Symbolizing Sentences from The Wizard of Oz

November & December are both Grammar months for us, with December being writing and putting on a unique Grammar-themed Class Play! We are coming along nicely on play planning and preparation, so I think there will be some extra time left to practice symbolizing sentences.


an unsymbolized sentence


the same sentence, symbolized

Here are the Nine Basic Montessori Grammar Symbols.


I'd like to use sentences from our lunchtime read aloud story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but I also need sentence constructions that aren't too difficult. Today I had a great idea!

When I was a child someone gave me The Wonderful Wizard of Oz coloring book (copyright 1974, still available today but with a new front cover). Of course, the storyline for this was simplified a bit (sorry, Queen of the Mice) and the text greatly abridged. Perfect for finding sentences to symbolize.


Here are my notes as to the sentences we will use and their parts of speech:

noun family + verb

p.10 - The little woman laughed.

p.3 - Aunt Em dropped her work.

p.2 - Aunt Em was washing the dishes.

p.37 - "Destroy them!"

p.50 - "Is it a kind heart?"


+ preposition

p.25 - The next morning they came to a field of beautiful flowers.


+ conjunction

p.2 - The sun and wind had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray.

p.3 - From the far north they heard a low wail of the wind, and the long grass bowed in waves before the coming storm.

p.47 - His only fear was of the Wicked Witches, and hearing Dorothy had killed the Witch of the East, he thought she could kill the Witch of the West.


+ adverb

p.2 - Uncle Henry sat upon the doorstep and looked anxiously at the sky.

p.38 - The Witch had always wanted those powerful shoes for herself.

p.43 - But the Tin Woodman was badly dented from his struggles against the Winged Monkeys, and the Scarecrow had lost much straw.

p.26 - Carefully they picked up Toto and put him in Dorothy's lap.

p.17 - His head and arms were jointed to his body, but he stood perfectly motionless.
("perfectly" is an adverb and it is modifying the adjective "motionless")

p.56 - Incredibly beautiful, her dress pure white, she leaned down toward Dorothy and looked at her with her kindly blue eyes.
("pure is an adjective" and it is modifying the noun "white"... like if it said "her dress pure fashion" or "her dress pure loveliness")


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