Monday, March 2, 2009

Green Eggs and Ham


Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss! We celebrated today by reading some of your books: Cat in the Hat, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and Huevos Verdes con Jamon. That latter one, we only have in Spanish. But if our girls learned anything today it was how to ask, "Te gustan huevos con jamon?" Of course, we like green eggs and ham. We had them for lunch today. Ewww...I mean Yum!
We have read some good books in Language Arts the past couple of weeks: Sam, Bangs, and Moonshine, Crow Boy and Tye May and the Magic Brush. Crow Boy made me cry! What excellent stories to teach kindness and compassion.
Kate has been learning about adjectives, adverbs, verbs. These are much more fun to learn with the Mad Libs gamebooks where you write in your own adjectives, etc. to create silly stories.
In History, we finished up the Roman Empire. Kate's assignment was to draw a Thank You Rome picture for all their contributions. She drew a picture of a giant swimming pool and hot tub complete with slides and fountains. I hope she is also thankful for BOOKS and the idea of a REPUBLIC. Kate thought the Romans were okay but she didn't agree with having slaves or watching gladiators fight each other for entertainment or copying all of the Greek gods and changing their names and especially she didn't like that they persecuted the Christians. The story of "Androcles and the Lion" was one good story that came out of all the gladiator fighting in the Colosseum.
"Nero was a Zero" is how we remembered the ridiculously bad Emperor who watched Rome burn. He blamed the Christians and then rejoiced that there was now room to build a gargantuan golden home for himself while thousands of citizens remained homeless.
We also learned about Constantinople and how he was converted to Christianity through a vision in the clouds. He and his soldiers fought in the name of Christ so he could become Rome's leader.
The Roman Empire was HUGE. Attila the Hun and other barbarians were constantly a threat. In the end the Empire became too big to control and Visigoths and Vandals invaded and destroyed it.
This is how Kate learned to remember it:
In 476
Rome was in a fix.
Little Romulus said farewell
and the Roman Empire fell.
I attended a very uplifting and inspiring book club night with other k12/homeschoolers. We discussed A Thomas Jefferson Education by Oliver DeMille. We as parents are to inspire our children to learn by reading and discussing the classics as well as letting children pursue their passions.
The next day I asked Kate what her passions were: mermaids, princesses, magic, soccer, singing, and being a rockstar. Those weren't exactly the subjects I had in mind for a curriculum...

1 comment:

Heather said...

Your homeschool sounds so fabulous. Can I come? Heather