ThadenPierce School

Complete these three requirements:

With your parent’s or adult partner’s permission, talk with someone who grew up in a different country than you did. Find out what it was like and how it is different from your experience.
Learn 10 words that are in a different language than your own.
Play two games that originated in another country or culture.
Academics Pin

Earn the Language and Culture belt loop, and complete seven of the following requirements:

Earn the BSA Interpreter Strip.
Write the numbers 1-10 in Chinese or another number system other than the one we normally use (we use the Arabic system).
Visit an embassy, consulate, or chargé d’affaires for another country.
Make a display of stamps or postcards of another country. Explain the importance or symbolism of the things depicted to that country’s culture.
Learn 30 words in a language other than your own. Practice saying these words with your den or an adult family member.
Learn a song in another country’s language. Sing the song for your den or an adult family member, and then tell what the words mean.
Say five words in American Sign Language. One of these words could be your first name.
Visit a restaurant that specializes in recipes from another country.
Watch a TV show or movie in a foreign language. Tell how easy or difficult it was to understand what was happening.
With your parent’s or adult partner’s permission, interview an interpreter. Find out what his or her job is like.
Make a list of 30 things around your home that were made in another country.
Read a book or story about an immigrant to the United States.

After a fun morning with friends at our “NOT back to school” picnic we talked & are meeting again with our co-op this week to see what we should do for this year. We hadn’t decided if we were going to keep meeting as families had new babies and moved but we’ve invited another family to join and we’re eager to see what we can come up with – this will be our fourth year together! We’ll be meeting on Thursday afternoons so I swapped our literature Friday with our history Thursday (since history is more involved for us.)

We are starting our Story of the World book one again this year with activity guide and when Christopher saw me pull it out he exclaimed, “I love that!” That’s a good sign. But we’re actually starting formally next week and doing things a bit out of order. Christopher’s currently fascinated by all things related to Greek mythology so we’re skipping ahead to those chapters and doing a unit study. I checked out a ton of books from the library (fiction, non-fiction, picture, chapter, craft, etc) and he’s looking up Greece in all of our atlases and kids’ geography books like Circling the Globe. We’ll do some map work and current social studies (and ask my sister for some input since she lived in Greece for 18 months on her mission to Athens) and embrace his passion. (This is all prompted by his racing through the Percy Jackson book series – he’s in book four now. I started reading it to him and got through two chapters, one a night, before he gave up on his poky mother’s pace and walked off to finish the book himself. And then books two and three…)

Though I remember very little from my mythology studies so I’m having to scramble to keep up with him! He’s drawn a family tree of the goddesses and gods and characters from the book and is enthralled. I love it!

We got a cool surprise in the mail today, a package from the Mealer grandparents filled with eight double sided placemats. The kids LOVE, love, love them and are sitting around the living room now reading them! They are heavily laminated so we can use dry erase markers on them and wipe them off and use them at mealtimes as well – these are fantastic, we’re so excited about them.

Topics include the presidents of the US, the solar system, multiplication tables, world map, US map, shapes, numbers and letters. The backs have games and more information for the kids and they are all entranced, from the 8 year old (telling me who is on each bill or coin as he looks as the presidents) down through the 1 year old (yelling, “W! One!” as he identifies things.)

History & cooking lesson, recipe here.

Post here and I was happy to see we own three of them & our library has another six so we’re only missing one. Neat, I’ll post about them later.

We own (and love) Ferdinand and Horton Hatches a Who. (In fact Kit was given Ferdinand by an old girlfriend – it has an inscription. I love books with inscriptions even if it’s not to me, such stories that come from asking about them! Both when I ask and when the kids ask who, “Who gave you this?)

Leo the Late Bloomer – Kit says, “This is mostly a message to the parents to quit stressing out, it’s not a message to the kids.” He also said he’s seen more visually engaging books with the same message. In this case Leo’s father gives up on him blooming and goes off to watch tv. Nice.

Snowflake Bentley is a nice book about a true story, a photographer-scientist pursuing his dream and how his family & community support his passion (though he did have skeptics, of course.)

Nana Upstairs, Nana Downstairs is a lovely book about a 4 year old boy and his relationship with his grandmother and great-grandmother. Despite them both passing away (one when he’s a child, she’s 94 and the other when he’s an adult) Mo described it as a “fun” book because of the boy’s interactions with Nana Upstairs. It was a sweet book.

Henry Builds a Cabin we all loved, based on Henry David Thoreau building a one room cabin while writing his book and his simple recycling and conservation efforts and focus on nature. Very Charlotte Mason, and one that launched some great discussions about big vs. small, living space, and needs vs. wants. The kids are looking through Material World now with Kit and discussing some big topics, such as where America falls in the financial global scene.

William’s Doll I actually thought was sad. He wants a doll to love and nurture and his older brother and neighbor kid both mock him and his father keeps coming up with stereotypical boy activities to do to break him of the desire to have a doll. Finally grandma grows up and gets him one and chews out dad (kindly) by saying William wants a doll so he can grow up to be a nice father someday. Implication being that William’s daddy totally failed on that parenting front since he didn’t support his son’s nurturing desire. (Go, Grandma, but boo for dad and older brother.)

The Little House was depressing, too. The home is abandoned by the family and suffocating in the city alone and unloved until a descendent of the original owners comes back to replace it. But really sad rendering of urban life.

So some were great, some were not fantastic.

At our library’s used book store Moira found these:

One is A Consumer’s Guide for Kids and the other is A Kid’s TV Guide – both part of the Weekly Reader’s Ready-Set-Grow Series. They were published in 1979 and it’s kinda frightening to consider how bad the statistics were about television violence 31 years ago vs. how much worse they must be now.

Christopher read the books quickly and Mo’s enjoying the illustrations but I think we will sit down and actually read them with all the kids – each has a lot of questions to help engage the kids in critical thinking. It was a fun find, I’m glad Moira snagged them – and even better, we paid $.50 for each. I love our library’s book store.

I’m very excited to explore this site introducing the US government to kids. It looks perfect for an overview and launching site for more in depth activities.

Including a geography game, which we needed! With various levels for kids, too.

From PW’s blog and good timing since we’re starting the kids’ versions of Shakespeare again for our literature this summer/fall.

1. William Shakespeare was born in 1564, but his exact birthdate is unknown. He was baptized on April 26 of that year, so his birth would have been shortly before.
2. Shakespeare did not go to college.
3. Shakespeare was eighteen when he married Anne Hathaway in 1582. She was 26 and expecting his baby. SCANDAL! The couple had a baby girl, then had twins, a boy and a girl, in 1584.
4. Sometime in the mid 1580’s, Shakespeare moved to London from his home in Stratford-upon-Avon.
5. Almost no information exists about Shakespeare’s activities from the time he moved to London to 1592, when he was described as an up-and-coming playwright in the London theater scene. Because of this, the years 1585 to 1592 are called “the lost years”.
6. According to reports, Shakespeare wrote quickly and with ease; Fellow playwright Ben Jonson said “Whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.”
7. Because of the plague outbreak in Europe, all London playhouses were closed between 1592 and 1594 because it was thought that crowded places helped facilitate the spread of the disease.
8. During this period, because there was no demand for Shakespeare’s plays, he began to write poetry.
9. In 1594, Shakespeare became one of the founders of Lord Chamberlain’s Men, an acting/theater group that soon became the leading player’s company in London.
10. In 1597, the theater in which The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed was forced to close since it had been built on leased land. Many partners invested in a new theater built on the south bank of the Thames river. The new theater was called The Globe.
11. Plays were performed only in the afternoon, by daylight.
12. Laws at the time prohibited people from dressing above their rank in life. Players (actors) were the only exception to this rule, and could dress as noblemen on stage without being arrested and locked in the stocks.
13. Women were not allowed to act in plays during Shakespeare’s time, so in all of his plays, women’s roles were performed by boys/young men. (This meant that in As You Like It, the boy player had to play Rosalind, a woman who pretends to be a man pretending to be…a woman! [If I described that correctly, someone bring me a doughnut.)
14. Though the printing press existed and books were being mass-produced all over Europe, Shakespeare had little interest in seeing his plays in print. He’d written them not to be read, but to be performed on stage.
15. Because they were often hastily written for performance on stage, none of Shakespeare’s original manuscripts exist.
16. Shakespeare returned to Stratford after he finished work on The Tempest, in 1611.
17. He died in 1616. The words “Curst be he that moves my bones” were inscribed on his grave.
18. Seven years after his death, some of Shakespeare’s fellow players published Shakespeare’s plays in a single volume, called First Folio. They wrote that their intention was “only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend, and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare.”
19. The following commonly used phrases are thought to be originally coined by William Shakespeare (many say these combinations of words did not appear in print before Shakespeare’s works):
All that glitters is not gold
All’s well that ends well
Bated breath
Dead as a doornail
Fancy-free
Fool’s paradise
For goodness’ sake
Good riddance
Heart of gold
In a pickle
Knock knock! Who’s there?
Laughing stock
Love is blind
Naked truth
Neither rhyme nor reason
One fell swoop
Star-crossed lovers
Pomp and circumstance
Pound of flesh
Primrose path
Too much of a good thing
Wear my heart upon my sleeve
What’s in a name?
Wild goose chase
The world’s my oyster
20. Shakespeare’s was said to have an extensive vocabular; his works contained more than 30,000 different words.

I Can Draw which I found at the young women’s garage sale fundraiser this morning. Also a cool looking science book and it was $1 for both!

Girls: A History of Growing up Female in America that I found at our library’s used book store for $2.

I love books, probably too much – I also picked up the Beatrix Potter collection for the little kids and a few other books. But I love GOOD books, ones that I actually find enriching and educational and entertaining. I love it even more when they are dirt cheap.

Take the quiz to find out!