"There’s nothing that can’t be conceptually presented on a map. Maps tell stories. It’s a visual for learning and understanding how the world works." Rola Tibshirani
So, the ESSENTIALS of a 4th school subject? For Geography, it has to be maps! Ask your children to imagine they are riding in a balloon or on a magic carpet above your neighbourhood. What would they see if they looked down? Encourage them to draw a sketch of the streets, the green spaces, the waterways, the rail tracks, the bridges. Get them to mark out the route of their daily walk or bike ride on this map, or their journey to school. Only when they have done this should you allow them to take a look at Google maps online (and perhaps talk about satellite photography), zooming in to find out how exact their memories were. Then, if they're still enthused by this exercise, encourage them to redraw their map more accurately and colour it in, neatly labelling the streets and other features. Tell them that you're going to mount this work of art, display it on a vertical surface in your house and take a photo of it.
Comment by my friend Benoit:
My son started collecting paper money from every country in the world when he was five years old. Doing that, he was learning where the country was, and who was the person on the bill. He has an incredible knowledge about geography and politics mainly because of that. His poor second grade teacher still remembers (14 years later) the day he asked the students to name 2 countries, and he would write the names on the blackboard. Sam put his hand up and the teacher had to write: Liechtenstein and Zimbabwe ... He never asked him again to name countries.
Geography Trivia Quiz
Inspired by Benoit's comment on my last home schooling post, remembering how many countries his son could name at the age of five, and thinking of another Ottawa family who often used to challenge one another to name the capital cities of countries around the world, until the game became too easy, I'm wondering if intelligent and competitive children could be encouraged to test their parents' knowledge of the world!
Tell the kids that there's going to be a Geography Trivia Quiz this evening, and that they are going to be the quiz masters. You want them to come up with at least fifty questions (and the answers to them, of course 😉). If other adult relatives could join in this quiz online, so much the better. Do it the other way round if you'd rather, parents quizzing children, but I think it's good psychology to let your children be the ones in control, from time to time.
Public speaking: a One Minute Speech
Here's a suggestion which shy children will hate, although sooner or later even the shy ones must learn ... how to address an audience. Acquiring that skill takes years of practice, but you could start to build their confidence in comfortable surroundings by challenging them, once in a while, to give a One Minute Speech to the family on some given subject: ELEPHANTS, for example, or HOW TO EAT AN EGG, or HULA HOOPS.
Your children will immediately discover that it's not easy to make a One Minute Speech, but it does get gradually easier if they repeat this exercise regularly. Give them sufficient thinking time or planning time first, and don't be over-critical if they giggle or break down. If they're still speaking after 60 seconds have elapsed, ring a bell (or make some such noise) to make them stop. Or use an egg timer.
If they seem frustrated by not succeeding, let them have another go.
I'm remembering Just A Minute --- a panel game that used to be broadcast regularly on BBC Radio 4 which proves that adults don't find this challenge easy, either.
Telling a story
An alternative to what I suggested yesterday for keeping families creatively occupied (making speeches on random subjects) would be to tell a story round the supper table.
Our family used to do this. One of us would start with "Once upon a time, there was a ..." for a few sentences, and then the next person would carry on the narrative. The story might well become surrealistic, with all the unexpected developments, but it had to remain coherent.
A variation on this game is to choose certain unrelated words that must be brought into the story, whatever happens. For example, tell a story that includes the words "tower ... bite ... Amsterdam ... tornado ..." You get the idea?
Treasure Island
Robert L. Stevenson wrote the book "Treasure Island" for his stepson, in the 1880s. The story is still a gripping read, even for adults! I once read it aloud to my children in bedtime episodes, an activity I'd strongly recommend to home schoolers because I just relished the rhythm and resonance of its famous, exciting words. ("I remember him as if it were yesterday" ... "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest" ... "Them that die'll be the lucky ones!" ... "Fetch aft the rum, Darby!" and so on). In Chapter VI comes the first mention of the island and its treasure:
The paper had been sealed in several places [...]. The Doctor opened the seals with great care, and there fell out the map of an island, with latitude and longitude, soundings, names of hills, and bays and inlets, and every particular that would be needed to bring a ship to a safe anchorage upon its shore. It was about nine miles long and five across, shaped, you might say, like a fat dragon standing up, and had two fine land-locked harbours, and a hill in the centre part marked 'The Spy-glass'. There were several additions of a later date; but, above all, three crosses of read ink --- two on the north part of the island, one in the south-west, and, beside this last, in the same red ink, and in a small, neat hand [...] these words: Bulk of treasure here.The other day, my grandson Tom in London created a treasure hunt with difficult clues, which the family seems to have enjoyed, but I don't think he drew a map first.
Either get your children to draw a Treasure Island where X marks the spot, or have them organise a Treasure Hunt around your house and garden. If you already did that with the Easter eggs, wait a few weeks before suggesting that same kind of activity; they might find it fun to have you doing the hunting instead of them, this time.
A slice of banana bread
Latest news: "Ontario high school students won't have final exams this year"! Presumably that applies in other parts of the world as well. However, they do have to keep learning and remembering what they have learned in school.
My suggestion for today is for high school students to prepare a Biology presentation on the progress of a slice of banana bread through your body after you have eaten it. What happens to this food: how does your body benefit from it and what route does it take through your digestive system? Preferably (for the sake of the audience) without sound effects, although pictures would enhance your presentation.
Chris and I both had something like this homework exercise when we were at school ourselves, in Year 10 or thereabouts. In Chris' case, he says it was a ham sandwich.
Stained glass windows
An arts and crafts tip for children stuck at home, something to hang in a sunny window. This activity does require adult supervision, because a hot iron's required. You could also experiment with tissue paper glued onto clingfilm / plastic wrap, or coloured pieces of cellophane. (This presupposes that you have such stuff lying around in your house.) You could go crazy and try to copy a picture of a stained glass window in a cathedral --- that might be rather too ambitious. At least take a look at some pictures on the Internet, for comparison purposes. A Google Images search for "stained glass windows" brings up some spectacular examples.
A Flower Hunt
Now that the spring flowers are blooming or starting to bloom, not only in Europe and the USA but even in Canada, my home schooling tip of the day is dedicated to my sister ❤️, who's a botanist.
Next time you go for a walk, tell your younger children that "We're going on a flower hunt...!" and stop to admire and maybe take a picture of every flower that they notice, both wild and cultivated, including the blossoms on trees. How many different kinds of flower can they find? If you or they can identify the flowers, make a catalogue or photo montage of what you find, complete with labels.
In the old days we used to press wild flowers that we'd picked, but their colours faded when we did that; photography is a better and less destructive way to preserve them. Let the children take some photos themselves. Drawing flowers is difficult, but let your older children try. If you're lucky enough to have a garden where you live, the children could pretend it is a Botanical Garden and label the plants with their Latin names, as Carl Linnaeus did. (I was in Uppsala in May 2017, revelling in his gardens.)
If you have access to tulips that you can pick and bring indoors, why not take a sharp knife and dissect a tulip flower head, to see what it consists of? Can your children name the parts of a flower and explain their function?
Word Pruning
I have been busy editing the next issue of the CFUW-Ottawa newsletter and my husband's presentation slides. I don't know whether or not this is an appropriate recommendation for home-schooling, but if you have teenage children, word-pruning (the art of paraphrasing) would be a useful skill from them to acquire. Cutting out 100 words from someone else's essay is a satisfyingly brutal exercise, harder if it's your own writing that you're trying to prune! Anyway, you can find some tips here.
Sign Language
When I taught in Britain there was a scheme to integrate children with severe hearing difficulties into mainstream schools. A few of them were brought into the school where I worked and I found it fascinating to see how they interacted with one another in the school yard by means of gestures, facial expressions and finger language rather than words. (They didn't integrate very well; they remained a group apart, probably for the sake of mutual support.)
I was sent on a one-day! training course to find out how to cope in a classroom with children who couldn't hear --- woefully inadequate training, although it was one of the most interesting days I've ever spent. As trainees, we were put into situations where we had to work out what people were saying without being able to hear them. It actually surprised me to realise how much I could understand or at least guess, and that lip-reading isn't completely impossible. I learned that it becomes easier once one knows the context. I also learned that there has to be unbroken eye-contact; otherwise one quickly loses the gist.
You never know when you might have to talk to someone who can't hear you. How would your family like to learn some Sign Language? Spend a while exploring this link and you'll at least discover to spell out your names. However, hand gestures can also convey whole words or phrases, so you'll need to look at this other link, too. If any of your family is interesting in acquiring skills for drama and improvisation, speech-making or recitations, or simply survival skills as a visitor to a foreign country, sign language is relevant. Tackling it will give you a new insight into the purpose of language in general.
I suggest that before you start imitating the hand gestures shown in the links, you try to have a conversation among yourselves by means of mime, keeping your mouths shut, but your hands and faces visible to one another. How well can you manage to get your message across? How frustrating is it to ask for something you need and not be understood?
P.S. to the children: this could work as another Secret Code for use when you don't want adults or other kids to understand what you are saying!
Braille
After writing yesterday's home-schooling tip about sign language and so on, it occurred to me that you could also think about people who find it hard to see. In this link, there are good ideas on how to turn this into a lesson, or you could teach your kids the Braille code that would spell their names. A couple more links here:
http://www.brailleauthority.org/learn/braillebasic.pdf?
fbclid=IwAR140dlclUAUST9pf6JKYnENlHJ5EHmlwV0q7hSxweOYSAvzN4ud1AmqJKQ
http://www.wonderbaby.org/sites/wonderbaby2.perkinsdev1.org/files/braille-cheat-sheet.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1Ky9uH9EhBrq4QK3Z0lTG1XVH42unDCnLZdLnQe1qZCLN0L13Osrj47pk
No comments:
Post a Comment