Finishing Up Our MLBs

Week Three: Aesop's Fables
overview on my website of all the stories for this block

Story Seven: "City Mouse, Country Mouse" from City Mouse, Country Mouse and two more mouse tales from Aesop

We worked as a group to draft a poem for two voices for "The Bear and the Bees." Click here to see our finished poem! (PDF)

The process of sleeping on a story and then remembering and retelling it is a powerful one which makes content sink deeper, whether it's Fables or Physics. One little boy quietly pulled me aside Monday morning to tell me his thoughts about an alternate moral for Friday's story, which was "The Bear and the Bees."

'Sometimes you just have to leave it be.'

I just thought of that when I woke up in bed.

Next we made mouse stick puppets using two large wooden spoons per child. While the glue was drying, the children drew the "set" on the chalkboard, showing a simple hole in the ground (for the country mouse's home) and a large house with a grand dining room (and the city mouse's home tucked below the spacious table, even featuring his own little bitty curvy chandelier). Then the students performed the story, sitting on a stool below the chalkboard.

After acting out the story, each person wrote a poem for two voices for "City Mouse, Country Mouse," which went in the MLB as their summary.

Story Eight: "The Fox and the Stork" from Aesop's Fables

We had a great time acting out this story over and over, using two shallow plates, two tall narrow vases, and a set of chopsticks.

Story Nine: We heard several versions of "The Tortoise and the Hare" but our favorite was from The Tortoise and the Hare by Jerry Pinckney

This is a nearly wordless picture book, with the moral being the only sentence. However, the author/illustrator slowly builds the moral throughout the course of the book, with the new word added being highlighted in red. On one page the sentence begins simply with only the word "slow"... on another page, "slow and"... on another page, "slow and steady" and so on, until the entire sentence has gradually been built and the tortoise has won the race. In the author's note Jerry Pinckney explains that he has always felt a personal connection to this fable, given his struggles as a dyslexic boy in school.


For this, our final story for our main lesson books, we both illustrated and acted out the story by making a moving picture from Making Picture Books with Movable Figures by Brunhild Muller. Students had great fun making these! Finally, we glued our finished pictures in our MLBs to serve as the illustration alongside our summaries. Students then glued in a small decorated envelope containing the loose animal pieces.

If you'd like to follow up with more fables at home, one classic collection is

Week Three: Ancient Mythology
overview on my website of all the stories for this block

Ancient India: We finished up Ancient India by modeling Buddha. One child also started to knit the pure white horse of King Sangara, using the horse knitting pattern in A First Book of Knitting for Children.

If you'd like to follow up with Jataka Tales at home, here are several suggestions:


I Once Was a Monkey: Stories Buddha Told


The Magic Plum Tree


Buddha Stories


Buddha

The Golden Deer by Margaret Hodges

Ancient Persia: We heard "Ahura Mazda and Ahrimen," "Hushang Discovers Fire," and "Zarathustra and the Kingdom of Light" from Ancient Mythologies: India, Persia, Babylon, Egypt by Charles Kovacs

One wonderful two-page spread we did featured a border of warm colors and flames around a list of Ahura Mazda's creations and a border of cool colors and icicles around a list of Ahrimen's creations. The illustration doesn't always have to be on one page with the summary facing; you can also incorporate the visual element into a border, into the font of the title of the summary, or into a background design with the summary in the middle of the page. Main lesson books give you endless opportunities to be creative, which is why they are made using unlined paper.

We also made Faloodeh (Persian Rose Water Ice)

If you'd like another Persian story to read at home (and this one is suitable for younger children too), I like

The Legend of the Persian Carpet

Ancient Mesopotamia: We heard "The Land of Two Rivers," "Marduk, the God Who Knew No Fear," and "Gilgamest and Eabani" from Ancient Mythologies: India, Persia, Babylon, Egypt by Charles Kovacs

Try a brick-making challenge at home! Who in your family can make a clay brick that best withstands the elements?

Try to press wedge-shaped marks into a clay tablet while it is still wet, emulating cuneiform.

Read more about the Babylonian contributions to our modern day life in

The Story of Clocks & Calendars

Another Babylonian legend you may enjoy is

Ishtar and Tammuz: A Babylonian Myth of the Seasons

Thank you to the family who arranged for us to buy eight straw bales for our straw bale cold frames this year (these bales will also be the planting beds for next year's vegetable garden), and delivered them!

Now on to the pictures:

felting hollow eggs for "The Milkmaid"

chalkboard drawing of Manu above, and a shadow puppetry set below

shadow puppetry for "The Crow and the Pitcher"

vase and marbles from shadow puppetry in my kitchen, drying off

"grapes" high in the dogwood tree for "The Fox and the Grapes"

labeling the curved side of wooden spoons, ready to make our puppets for "City Mouse and Country Mouse"

the fancy abode of the City Mouse

straw bales!

laying down a corrugated cardboard layer as a weed block

simple cold frame design with straw as insulation and an old window covering the center

the straw bales will get moved to the outside edge of the garden in the spring; these will be planted DIRECTLY into, after spending the winter conditioning (flip them over to get the best fungus on top)

the warm palette and cool palette for Ahura Mazda and Ahrimen

ready to act out "The Fox and the Stork"

clay modeling of Gilgamesh and Eabani

making moving pictures for "The Tortoise and the Hare"

Faloodeh (Persian Rose Water Ice)

Homeschool Co-op Week 6! We had a lovely week finishing up our orange MLB's. This abbreviation stands for main lesson books (one student said his mom calls them "my little books," which I think is so sweet). Donna Simmons refers to them as Good Books, since they are to contain your very best work. Best spelling, best penmanship, best grammar, etc.

MLBs are the one time in our day -- every day -- when the full writing process is required. Rough draft, edit, final draft. This includes drafting the overall layout of the two-page spread, sketching out the illustration, and writing a rough draft of the summary, which we call "words of explanation." Rough drafts for the older children work best when they are double spaced, since often we need to add in extra details or transitions between paragraphs or move sentences into a different order.

Usually this work is done completely behind the scenes. MOST children recycle their rough drafts instead of taking them home to their parents because they want the finished books to be a complete surprise.

Here are some examples of rough draft work:

Sometimes, it makes more sense to start again and write a second draft, to be sure that the organization of the page makes sense and that the words of explanation would be easy for a reader to follow. In the case of this rough draft (the last one pictured above), we stopped the edit half-way through, which at first had just focused on spelling, and decided to completely rewrite the poem for two voices to make it easier for the reader to follow what was happening. The MLBs do more than just review content and help students to synthesis their learning. They are wonderful opportunities for one-on-one conferences and writing mini-lessons embedded in a real-world context!

I would like to do a blog post with lots of pictures of the completed MLB pages... once children have had a chance to share them with their parents, since I want to respect their wishes and not accidentally spoil someone's surprises.

We do not put names on the books, number the MLB pages, or write the title on the front cover until the very end of the block. Thus, it is easy to pick up the book, open it, and hastily add a page or two that are written upside down! Students need to work slowly and carefully and be organized to make an entire book out of what is essentially a blank packet of stapled pages.

Once every single story has been added, we number the pages, write a table of contents, add author information to the back cover (name, age, 2016-2017) and a title and illustration to the front cover. We worked VERY hard on Friday finishing all of these steps!

Here are some of the other highlights of the week:

Yoga, Farm Day, and Philosophy (sharing our research reports on endangered animals)

Poem ("Sloth" by John Cotton), Math Facts, and Morning Pages

New Educational Game - Enchanted Forest. This game strengthens working memory so we are including it as a Brown work choice (P.E. and Health).

Art - Drawing - making alphabet books of animals, fruits & vegetables, or other items from A to Z (this required using the dictionaries and encyclopedias and practicing alphabetizing and using the tables of contents and indexes in reference materials). We especially like The Princeton Encyclopedia of Mammals and The Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds!

Download a free PDF of giant block letters from A to Z, one page per letter, at The Measured Mom.com.

Art - Modeling - modeling two stories from the Ancient Civilizations block, Buddha (using still-warm homemade spice-citrus play dough) and Gilgamesh wrestling with Eabani (using clay).

I adapted the Spiced Citrus Playdough recipe from the Childhood 101 blog by allowing the children to experiment with the spice mixture, choosing from the large variety of options I set out.

We ended up with this recipe:

Combine in a large saucepan
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup salt
2 T cream of tartar
2 T vegetable oil
1 3/4 cups water
1/4 cup lemon juice
a few drops of lemon extract
zest of one lemon, finely grated
1 1/2 tsp lemongrass powder
1 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground cardamom

Stir constantly over medium heat until the mixture congeals and forms a ball, approximately 3-5 min. Continue to heat for another minute, constantly turning over the ball of dough. Remove from heat and knead until the dough is smooth.

We enjoyed The Hermit and the Well while kneading the dough.

Extra Lesson - my older group had grammar lessons on punctuation (comma splices, apostrophes, and colons & semicolons), worked on spelling, and made Faloodeh (Persian Rose Water Ice) when we were learning about Persia

I work hard to help students to draw connections between what they are learning whenever possible. And I always try to maximize our time!!! Sharing animal research reports or hearing the read-aloud story during lunch (we started The Fox That Wanted Nine Golden Tails), working on alphabet books and being called one at a time to help make the play dough, then hearing a story about Buddha while kneading the play dough as it cools, the older students hearing the story of Zarathustra while drawing the border around the two-page main lesson book spread of Ahura Mazda and Ahrimen (warm colors and a border of flames on one page, cool colors and a border of icicles on the other), the younger students doing Handwork while hearing Fables (weaving potholders, finger knitting, sewing little felt gnomes)... we are always busy!

I'm going to make a separate post with our final stories for this main lesson block, since I have pictures to share and this post is already quite long!