Physical Play: Ice Skating

And now a post in pictures that reveals that our family is totally, abjectly, spoiled:

Recess: Tai Chi

For recess, we did Tai Chi.

Three poses:

The Empty Stance

Rooster Stands on One Leg

and Crouch Step

It wasn’t a super big hit — the poses were hard, and Floppy spent half of his recess in time out for playing with the Tai Chi book not so nicely.

Addition

We worked on addition today with the aid of my aunt’s 1979 math textbook, Mathematics Revealed. Well, that and a box of Cheerios. Cheerios and other boxed cereals are usually expensive, and they are a rare treat in our household, so they are great for homeschooling. We learned the meaning of the word “sum” and “equation” and the remarkable role of zero in addition. (It does nothing!) We also used the Cheerios as counters to do complicated sums: 23 + 14; 15 + 8. Having practiced on the Cheerios, we worked our way up to expanded forms of addition, partial sums, and introduced the idea of “carrying.” In the end, Floppy could do and check a great big fancy sum like 708 + 99 + 132.

To learn the commutative law of addition, we played store. I made a sheet of play dollar bills, and hired Floppy to be my employee. We made believe he worked a two-day workweek; Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, I hired him to pick up his birthday cards and arrange them on our side table, for a day’s wages of $3. He did this task very willingly, and then I told him to take his money home and go to bed. Then the alarm clock rang: Tuesday had arrived. On Tuesday, I hired him to pick up his play scissors and a mask he had made, and put them away in his room. This was harder work, so his day’s wages was $5.

“How much money did you make this week, Floppy?”

“$8″

“Well, it just so happens it costs $8 in my company store to buy a pile of Cheerios for a snack.” (I hold my son in debt bondage; please nobody teach him the tune to Sixteen Tons.) Crunch, crunch, crunch: A satisfied customer.

Next workweek arrived: He earned $5 on Monday for putting away his dirty laundry, some clean laundry, and a library book. He earned $3 on Tuesday for putting away some scraps from a craft project and papers from school (I’m liking this math lesson more all the time).

“How much money did you make, Floppy?”

“$8″

“But how can that be? Last week I paid you $3 on Monday and $5 on Tuesday and you made $8. This week I paid you $5 on Monday and $3 on Tuesday; but you still earned $8?”

“Mama; as long as you use the same amounts, it doesn’t matter when you pay me. The numbers can change places and the sum is the same!”

And that’s the commutative law — the textbook taught us the Latin derivation, and a bit more about the associative law, which we also demonstrated. Next time we’ll do some practice exercises.

Hindi 1-10

Tonight we tried learning 1-10 in Hindi in our ongoing exploration of various cultures in terms of how they count their digits.

Here’s the video we started with:

Did you know the word ‘punch’ in English is just the Hindi word for five, because punch originally had five ingredients and was an import from India?

In keeping with our usual practice, we also had an Indian-inspired dinner and listened to Indian music, specifically ragas. Here’s one we particularly liked:

For dinner I made a quickie Chicken Biryani, very loosely inspired by this one. DH asked me to write down what I actually did, because he thought it was delicious. So here’s how it happened, complete with the usual “what will I use for that?” fridge cleaning that impromptu ethnic cooking can create. Authentic it isn’t, but it was tasty. (Oh, and don’t be scared by the long ingredients list — it’s mostly spices, with very little prep or fresh ingredients required)

Quickie Chicken Biryani a la Chez Don’t Buy It

• 2 t paprika
• 1 t tumeric
• 1 t cumin
• 2 t garam masala
• 1 t ground coriander
• 1 t salt
• 1 t hot pepper sauce
• 1/2 cup tomato sauce (I used Muir Glen)
• 1 cup chocolate flavored yogurt (Stonyfield Farm)
• A garlic-ginger paste made from 3 T Ginger Chips and 2 large cloves garlic mashed in a mortar and pestle with 2 T water to make a fragrant paste
• 2 c cooked chicken in bite-sized pieces
• 7 T olive oil
• 3 onions thinly sliced into rings
• 4 c water
• 2 c fancy rice (we used jasmine, should have been basmati)
• 1/2 c milk
• 1/2 t tumeric (a pinch of saffron would have been better, but we didn’t have any)
• 1/2 t ground cardamom

Put the spices up to and including hot pepper sauce in a cast-iron fry pan and heat over medium heat until smoking and fragrant. Toss with the chicken pieces, then stir in yogurt, tomato sauce, and garlic-ginger paste and let sit on the counter to marinate briefly. Meanwhile, stir the water, rice, milk, extra tumeric, and cardamom in a large pot and put on to boil, stirring once. When it reaches a boil, reduce heat to low, cover, and cook 14 minutes until the rice is done. In the dirty pan in which you roasted the spices, add the oil and sliced onions and fry over low heat until the onions are a deep golden brown. Then stir in the chicken mixture and let simmer 5-10 minutes while you set the table. Voila.

We served this with hot tea and blood oranges, and it was a truly lovely meal. Yum.

Blogging

Floppy would like you to know that he is updating his peace blog. He appreciates comments!

He also wrote a letter to the POTUS about the new peace club he is hoping to start at school, asking him to join the peace club as a founding member. I hope he writes back, like Dr. Laurie Marker did today — Robin had raided his piggy bank to send her a donation, so she sent him a postcard from Namibia.

The Wizard of Oz

We’ve been reading aloud from The Wizard of Oz. I’ve read a lot of Oz books, because my aunt is an Oz scholar, but between umpteen viewings of Judy Garland’s version, somehow I was never interested enough to read the famous first book.

So now we’ve read it. I actually was impressed by how faithfully the movie hewed to the story — if you’ve seen the movie, you have all the key elements of the book, from the charlatan wizard from Omaha to the poppy fields and the winged monkeys. An enjoyable — and very fast — read aloud; we did it in two one hour read-aloud blocks.

Building a Sailboat

For his birthday, Floppy’s uncle gave him an Uberstix Sailboat kit

It’s a clever idea: This is one toy in a building system that can incorporate recycled items like Popsicle sticks, paper clips, and plastic bottles, and that can also mate with most other building kits, like Legos and K’nex. It’s also designed to make high quality buildable toys that work and last, rather than things you disassemble and put away. And, it comes with lab sheets that encourage you to make modifications to the basic design and test out how they work, making an excellent science project. It even comes with suggested ways to use broken pieces to enhance your creativity. I really like the design.

All that said, though, it was rated for ages 8+. Floppy is just 7, and it was totally above his head. I’m 37, my husband is 39, and half the time it was totally above our heads.

I think this would be a terrific toy and science project for an engineering-minded older kid, but could be frustrating if building toys and projects are not your forte.

A Trip to Cuba

For Christmas, Santa brought Floppy Putumayo Presents: Latin Playground English and Spanish Activity Kit:

It includes a workbook of activities, a Putumayo music compilation of Latin music, and a “passport” which kids can use as a workbook to document their travels through the eight Latin American and Spanish-speaking countries in the guide. We’ve begun on this as a social studies unit, and we spent most of the afternoon today visiting Cuba.

Floppy began by personalizing his passport with a photo of himself, his name, birthplace, current residence, and today’s date. Then, we began our journey.

There’s only one song or so per country on the CD, so instead of using that resource, we went to Fidel’s Eyeglasses, a terrific Cuban music blog, to provide our background music for the day.

We made a Cuban dinner of media noche (Cuban sandwich) and natilla (Cuban pudding), both of which were delicious. (We got the recipes here.) We talked about other typical Cuban foods, like Moros y Cristianos, which is a dish we eat regularly around here.

We talked about how and why it is illegal for us to visit Cuba, and we looked at photographs (courtesy Google images) of the Callejon de Hamel, where people from Havana go on the weekends to dance and play music. We searched YouTube for videos of various types of Cuban music: son, rumba, guajira, and timba. We talked about Spanish colonization of Cuba, and how the African slave trade affected the culture and the music in Cuba. We talked about Cuba’s agricultural products, like sugar. We learned a few Cuban Spanish words (from the Putumayo book), such as Camello (it means camel, and is the word for the Havana bus, which is a huge pink trailer with two humps).

We looked at YouTube videos illustrating typical Cuban instruments, such as the Conga, the Corneta China, the Tres, and the Clave. We talked about Cuban holidays. We looked at pictures of the Bee Hummingbird and the Wahoo Fish.

Next, we made Carnival masks, using these Mardi Gras mask templates printed off and glued to cardboard. We decorated them with plastic jewels, glitter, and markers, and then had a carnival parade and dance through the house to Cuban music.

Floppy finished the evening filling in his passport with an account of his “trip” — cut out pictures of a map of Cuba, the Cuban flag, and Cuban instruments (thank you again Google images), as well as a list of the words he’d learned, a drawing of his Carnival mask, and a list of facts learned about Cuba, with wobbly spelling.

Multiplication Tables

For math yesterday we worked a multiplication table. This is a little above my 7-year-old’s head, but he enjoys the challenge. He was able to get most of the numbers simply by adding “another 8″ and so on, and he understands the idea of “times” for small numbers, as in, 2X2 = two, two times, and 1X0 = one, zero times.

Continuing cultural explorations 1-10

We moved from counting in Chinese to counting in Japanese with this helpful website. (Scroll down for an incredibly useful mnemonic video.)

To go with the counting, we made onigiri with various fillings. I make mine using a plastic bag, in a simple round shape, with simple fillings and some kind of ersatz-furikake. Tonight I made two sweet ones (one filled with raisins, one with strawberry jam; both rolled in cinammon sugar, and two savory ones (one filled with a quartered marinated artichoke and one filled with umeboshi, both rolled in a furikake made from crushed black sesame seeds, peppercorns, wasabi peas, roasted salted soybeans, and I forget what all).

Lots more basic than our Chinese counting lesson, but just as fun!