School For Us: SOTW

Showing posts with label SOTW. Show all posts

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Symmetry...and Book Burning (or, subbing at our co-op)

Yesterday, I substituted for an art class at our co-op. There are only 4 children in the class; they're between the ages of 6 and 10. The teacher usually gives some kind of art demonstration and then lets the children do whatever they want with the supplies.

I decided to do a lesson on symmetry that I'd found at mathwire and used with Alex several years ago. I enjoyed creating several examples and sharing them with the students. Only one child used my lesson. He created a shield. (I also made a snowflake and one student had me show her how to do that.)

The art room has TONS of supplies, and the kids really have fun doing their own thing. (Below is just a small portion of the supplies.)

I'm substituting next week for a history teacher. They are talking about the library at Nineveh (from Story of the World 1). She wanted me to talk with the students (4th-6th graders) about book burning. She gave me copies of several articles, but I'm not sure where to go with this. And, as I did further research, it sounds like the Nineveh library was partly destroyed just because of war. It had nothing to do with book burning.

So, I'm trying to figure out what I'll teach next week. As a sub, I can follow the teacher's plan, or come up with my own ideas. My thoughts...

I could go with book burning - if so, any ideas?
I also thought about the Dewey Decimal system (this class incorporates Language Arts into SOTW) and/or the history of libraries... or other famous libraries???
The students are also talking about the next chapter which covers Nebuchadnezzar's Madness and The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, so I could teach something about one of those

Anyway, I was just seeing if anyone had any great ideas. :-) And, I'm sure some of you have used SOTW and might have some ideas from something you did with one of these chapters.

Thanks for any ideas!!!

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Lessons with Anansi at Story Cove

Today I substituted in one of my daughter's classes. The class is using Story of the World and this week's chapter was about Ancient Africa and included 2 stories about Anansi the Spider.

As I was preparing for this class, I found a site called Story Cove. You need to register, but this site is FREE! They have online cartoon videos of various stories, including a handful of Anansi stories. The stories are sorted by continent, with most of the stories come from Africa and Asia.

The site includes an area for kids to print off coloring pages, mazes, etc. And, it has free LESSON PLANS! Though the plans are mostly for kids in grades PreK-3rd, I found they worked well for my class of 4th & 5th graders. And, the kids REALLY enjoyed the videos! (We ended up watching 4.)

After doing some mapwork of Africa, we watched the video of Anansi & the Pot of Beans. Using the Lesson Plan, we covered:

similes
friendly letters
cause & effect
acrostic poems

Here's another sample of lessons from Anansi & Turtle Go To Dinner:

cooking
verbs
fact vs. opinion
proverbs
onomatopoeia

It's a great site I've never heard of before, so I thought I'd spread the word. Check it out!

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Making a Comic Strip

I subbed for one of my daughter's co-op classes today. The class is using SOTW (Story of the World) I and today they were discussing the legend of the empress Lei Zu and how she discovered silk. I loved the assingment the teacher left for the children, and I honestly don't know if it was in the SOTW teacher's guide or if the teacher came up with it herself. She just left me the lesson plan.

The children's assigment was to read the legend and then create a comic strip of 5-9 frames telling the story. I enjoyed drawing alongside the children! The comics are supposed to be in color, but I haven't colored mine yet. Anyway, I thought this could be a great activity for many lessons - especially if you have children who love comics or love to draw! And so, I thought I'd share my comic with you...

Ugh!!! I've been trying to download these photos off & on all day and having the worst time getting them to load in the correct orientation. I have a Canon and I read that it is sometimes the problem. So, I did as they said and resaved the photos with a different program. I got 2 more photos with that, but I can't get the others. Anyone have any advice?

Monday, January 29, 2007

SOTW Ch. 18 - Life in Early Crete

We missed doing a SOTW chapter last week, but we did chapter 18 today. There were 2 main subjects: bull-jumpers (very interesting!) and the story of King Minos and the Minotaur.

For our activity, we built a maze for our Minotaur. Again, we used some Littlest Pet Shop critters to act out the story and used Model Magic to build our maze. It was a lot of fun!

Monday, January 15, 2007

Chosen Video - Moses & the Israelites

We watched a good video about Moses & the Israelites. It ties in nicely with where we're at in SOTW. It's the video called Chosen at www.kids4truth.com.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

SOTW Ch. 16 - The Assyrians

Today we read chapter 16 of SOTW about the Assyrians. We decided to act out these 2 stories using Model Magic and Littlest Pet Shop critters.

Ashurbanipal & the Assyrians (cats) attack a walled city (dogs) with a ramp, siege tower, and bows & arrows.

Ashurbanipal (bulldog) is in Nineveh with its beautiful gardens. His assistant (Panda) is showing him a tablet he found about Hammurabi and Ashurbanipal decides to create the first library.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

SOTW Ch. 15 - The Phoenicians

We started back to school yesterday and covered Ch. 15 of SOTW about the Phoenicians. The first part of the story talked about how the Phoenicians invented glass blowing. We watched a video of a glass blower at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4079871377202668373&q=glass+blowing&hl=en

I'd also bought a "glass art" kit from Scholastic recently and we played with it. It's more like stained glass then glass blowing. I made a Hello Kitty face and Alexandra made a balloon, a bear, and a bluebird.

I also thought I had some plastic bubbles, but we couldn't find them. With plastic bubbles, you place some of the bubble-material on the end of a small "pipe" and blow a bubble. We weren't able to do it, but she remembered them so it was a great way to explain glass blowing.

Today, we read about Princess Dido (pronounced "Dee Dough") of Tyre and the ox skin. She fled from her brother and went to Carthage. She wanted to purchase some land and the local ruler told her she could purchase as much land as she could enclose with an ox skin. She cut the skin into hundreds of tiny strips and was able to purchase a large piece of land.

For a demonstration, I cut out a "skin" from a piece of paper & we acted out the story. I'm so glad we did as I found out my daughter had misunderstood the story! As I cut out the strips, she laid them side by side instead of end to end. Anyway, we were able to show how one small "skin" could cover a large area! It was a neat, spur-of-the-moment idea!

Friday, December 15, 2006

SOTW Ch. 14 - 10 Plagues and the Exodus

In SOTW, we've been studying Moses this week. We continued the past 2 days by reading about God's 10 plagues on Egypt and the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt.

For the 10 plagues, we colored cartoon pages from the following website: http://www.aish.com/passfamily/passfamilydefault/Ten_Plagues_Coloring_Pages.asp

For the Exodus, we read a great book called Exodus from Egypt by Mary Auld. We also created a scene of the Red Sea parting that I found at this site:
http://www.aish.com/passfamily/passfamilydefault/Ten_Plagues_Coloring_Pages.asp . (They also have a Joseph's "coat of many colors" we could have used earlier.) We love these Making Friends dolls and we used these to act out the story.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Baby Moses

We've moved on to the next chapter in SOTW and we are studying Moses. The first part was about Moses as a baby. We enjoyed the story and then we made our own "basket" out of Model Magic.

We then put the basket in the pool to see if it would float! We did this BEFORE we put baby Moses in the basket, because we didn't want her to sink. :-) After seeing it WOULD float, we added our baby Moses (who is actually a girl doll playing a boy)

The basket floated for a few minutes, and then started to fill with water. Alexandra saved "baby Moses" by picking her up by the hair. I guess it's good our Moses had plenty of hair! (the photo is kind of dark, but hopefully you can make it out)

Tomorrow, we move on to the "10 plagues" and the "Red Sea." I've got some neat things planned and I'm excited! I'm so glad Alexandra enjoyed history today. Trying the basket IN the water was a spur of the moment idea, and I'm glad it worked!

Good book we read: Moses in the Bulrushes retold by Hutton - I espeically liked the illustration of the basket - it's what we used when we made ours

Monday, December 11, 2006

SOTW Ch. 13 - Hatshepsut & King Tut

We've been doing SOTW (Story of the World) Vol. 1 this year which covers ancient history. We have the workbook, but I just haven't been very inspired with the activities so far. We've only done a few. So, in an effort to make our school days more fun & memorable, I decided to do what I usually do on a subject - research on the internet. So, to spice up learning about Hatshepsut & King Tut, and hopefully learn & remember more, here is what I found:

In Dallas, I saw a sign for an exhibit about Hatshepsut! It closes Dec 31st, so we probably won't get to see it, but I found a slide show of 19 of the objects that are part of the exhibit. This is from The Metropolitan Museum of Art: http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={92C8F718-137B-4AE6-9FAA-C8DA6CCE72CC} If this link doesn't work, I just googled "hatshepsut museum". On the site, there is a button that says "view a slideshow." I also read about Hatshepsut at the Kimbell Art Museum site from Fort Worth at http://www.kimbellart.org/exhibitions/exhibitions.cfm?id=29.

Also, we played a great game online called Hatshepsut's Revenge. It's actually about King Tut being haunted by Hatshepsut. It takes about 45 minutes or more, and my daughter enjoyed it so much that she wanted to play again! We "spiced it up" by going all over the house as we "looked for clues." I just took my lapbook along with me and when it says something like, "you go to the bedroom..." well, we went to the bedroom. You can find the game by googling: "Hatshepsut's Revenge."

Our next chapter is about Moses and I have some great plans for us! :-)

Great book about Tut - Tutankhamen's Gift by Sabuda - this really reinforces this part of SOTW and we enjoyed finding the 2 cats on most pages

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