We finished our "Road to Revolution" project yesterday. We found the project idea online, that a fourth grade class did in groups. Obviously we don't have "groups", but we worked together on it. She researched 10 events that led up to the United States becoming a country, found the year it happened and wrote up 2 sentences summarizing the event. We purchased a medium sized poster board and I drew a "road" with ten segments for her to write her sentences in and Sophie decorated the "road sides" with trees and a period style house. She worked quite hard on it, and we are both proud with the results. I'm not going to lie and say she did this completely alone. I helped her research the events, using the textbook the school lent us and Wikipedia, and helped her to summarize the events into a more kid friendly couple sentences. All in all, though, she did the bulk of the work, and I think learned something along the way. She didn't much like the writing part of it, as she struggles with putting her thoughts onto paper, but she did like the research and looking up ideas for the illustrations. She does enjoy history when it isn't all about dates and textbooks. Once again, she needs to be able to see it and have it in front of her, visually teaching her. Words and pictures in a book are just not enough.
We have been watching a lot of "Octonauts" on Disney Junior. All 3 of the kids are interested in marine biology right now, following our trip to the beach, and this show is a fun way of learning snippets of it. We watched an episode yesterday that was about a baby dolphin getting lost because he ended up being in the wrong slip stream. This was something new to ALL of us, because even I didn't know about slip streams or that each dolphin has its own whistle that identifies them. In the same episode was a species of fish we had never heard of called "spookfish", which are a subspecies of barrelfish who have transparent heads. "Octonauts" may not be the most scientific of ways of learning, but it appeals to all three of the kids at once, which I like. No one is over their head, everyone is having fun, and they are learning without even realizing it :)
We are also into what I guess would be called cryptozoology right now. There are several tv programs on discovery and destination America (channels) that are about animals/creatures that may or may not exist. Sophie and Lil Man are very into this right now and have been on the fence about the actual existence of the creatures. Sophie is more believing I think, which I found surprising considering she is the older one. She is very fanciful though, and imaginative, thinking up stories and ideas that are less realistic in nature. I like when the shows take a more scientific route than just a retelling of people's stories, personally, because they see how "scientists" or researchers find evidence either way and theorize from there. They both like ghost hunter type shows, too, and often have their own expeditions. Sophie uses her ipod to record them trying to find the ghosts or creatures, or acts like they have caught evidence of either thing. We have discussed how scientists theorize that ghosts are a type of energy and therefore show up using several devices that measure different types of energy, like the people of TAPS use. I think we will do more research on that and maybe conduct our own "ghost hunt".
