Saturday, May 19, 2012

Monday, June 14, 2010

Dmitri Mendeleev and the Periodic Table

Thanks to the Univ. of Nottingham videos described in my earlier post, the boys are still going nuts over the Periodic Table, learning the element names, symbols, and even atomic numbers (their idea, not mine). As it so happens, I found a one-hour audiobook, written for children, about Dmitri Mendeleev ("Mendeleyev and the Periodic Table," by Katherine White, and yes, there are two accepted spellings of the man's last name), who figured out the repeating properties of the (then) known elements (and predicted the ones that had yet to be discovered) to create the Periodic Table. It's a great story (the Table was the target of much scoffing and derision at first--and he thought it up during a short nap after a sleepless three-day marathon thinkfest), not too long (we were in a two-hour car ride, and it was just right). Then again, it put my five-year-old and my husband to sleep (luckily, I was driving), but the seven-year-old and I enjoyed it. Here's the link:

http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/products/ProductDetail.jsp?productID=BK_ADBL_000375&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes

LOVE Audible.com. And they don't even pay me to say that!

Monday, May 24, 2010

Jumping Right In

For those of you who know our family, you'll know that we are about to make our second move in 18 months, from northern California back to the southland. For a variety of educational and family reasons (as opposed to religious ones), we are going to homeschool our two boys, aged 5 and 7. We've been doing a lot of learning outside the classroom already, so I'm hoping this won't be quite such a shocking change as it might seem.

We'll be following Susan Wise Bauer's classical curriculum, as outlined in her book, "The Well-Trained Mind," as the backbone of our coursework, which means following a four-year, history-based cycle. Since Kyle is just finishing first grade in traditional school, we'll need to do some catch-up this summer in covering the Ancients (which is usually covered in first grade in this curriculum). Not a huge problem, as we've been reading the Greek myths for a while now, and that's a good start. Reece, who is just finishing junior kindergarten, will be covering the same material and stories, but in a more age-appropriate way. Example? Last night he created a drawing of Icarus flying too close to the sun and falling out of the sky and into...the wax? Okay, he's a little mixed up on the story, but it's a start.

My teaching approach might be called "immersion." Which means that we not only listen to Bauer's "Story of the World" series (first volume, which fits with first grade) on our iPod (hooray for Jim Weiss, best storyteller ever...see http://www.greathall.com ...although we love Jim Dale, too), but have also downloaded some Greek music by the Petros Tabouris Ensemble that is supposedly what the ancients may have listened to, and we found a catchy tune for children about Ancient Greece by Mark Clark on iTunes. Here is a very short sample of the lyrics:

Greece was a fabulous place, a fabulous place,

Yes, a fabulous place,

Did lots of good for the human race

What a fabulous place was Greece

In Athens there’s a temple called the Parthenon

The acropolis is the hill it's on

The agora it looks down upon,

That’s a marketplace in Greece

More tie ins: we've been enjoying the University of Nottingham's Periodic Table videos (http://www.periodicvideos.com) and learning the names and symbols of the elements. As it so happens, the Story of the World is currently talking about the Mycenaeans and how their use of bronze weapons helped them win battles and exert power. So off we go to Wikipedia (with caution, but yes) to discover that bronze is about 90% copper and 10% tin. So now we've got chemistry and math working for us. LOVE this. Off to YouTube to find some videos of folks re-creating smelting from ancient times. Still looking for a good one, but I confess that I do love how much information is so quickly available via the web, and how well the kids grasp it when it's presented in so many ways.

And don't forget geography; we've been learning (yes, we, as my own geographic knowledge is surprisingly pathetic) capitals of the world. It's more fun for me to teach/learn the ones with wacky names like N'Djamena (Chad), Oagadougou (Burkina Faso), Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) and Antananarivo (Madagascar) than the traditional ones of Paris, London, Berlin. Then there are the "easy" ones: Mexico/Mexico City, Guatamala/Guatamala City, Panama/Panama City, Djibouti/Djibouti, Algeria/Algiers, etc. (Kyle has decided that the capital of Peru, Lima, is like "lemur" as spoken by someone with a Boston accent.) We made a salt-dough model of Turkey showing the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus, which of course is coming in handy as we read about Troy ("Black Ships Before Troy") and ancient Olympics (via "The Magic Treehouse #16: Hour of the Olympics). We love the Jack and Annie books!

We'll be going to a Greek festival with (Greek!) friends this weekend so we can taste some of the food and otherwise immerse ourselves in all things Greek. I admit that we're going to be giving short shrift to the Egyptians this time around, but we'll hit them again once Kyle is in 5th grade. And we'll hit Ancient Rome later this summer.

Almost forgot one last item: Disney has recently re-released a 1959 film, "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land," on DVD, which has a nice little bit about the Greeks and Pythagoras, plus a bunch of other math that is way over the kids' heads now, but will begin to make sense in the coming years. And they seem to like it regardless, which is great.

If you have good tie-ins to recommend, by all means, speak up!