Happy Chinese New Year! This is what we did for "CHINA" week:
We celebrated Chinese New Year with enthusiasm (if not accuracy). We started by sweeping out the house (bad luck and evil spirits). I liked that part. The house was a disaster from Sunday so it was sort of essential because we couldn't find the school room.Feeling fresh from Sunday we began with our gospel connection, we did an addition page (26 problems like this 35+59=) from the January Friend magazine to decode a scripture about sharing the gospel. I taught him how to add the amounts using an abacus. He got the hang of it after a few problems but gave up the abacus entirely by the end because he preferred doing the sums in his head. He can carry in his head. Is that normal?
We discussed the basics of Budhism and the things we had in common. We learned what zen means and the benefits of meditation. He related it to the guys on Star Wars having to think good thoughts so they wouldn't turn to the dark side. yup. We read a cute picture book called, Zen Shorts and learn some Budhist legends.
We made red envelopes with money amounts on them and had Matty count out coins to match the amounts. He gave each one to a member of the family, the most money went to... you guessed it, himself. :) We did a science project to try to shine up a lucky penny, using salt vinegar and water to see which combinations worked the best on a dirty penny. (Salt and Vinegar). We didn't have any chopsticks so we tried to eat our stir fry at dinner with Popsicle sticks. We went with daddy to lunch the next day at an Asian restaurant to try out real chopsticks. Ally likes rice.
We learned the symbols for numbers 1-12 in Mandarin and how to write our chinese names. Wes studied chinese inventions: dominos, abacus, umbrellas, kites (and flew some), pet goldfish (visited some at Wal-Mart), and fireworks (wished we had some). We learned about the Yangtze river in china and the other geographical higlights (Mt. Everest), studied Tigers and other big cats and a bit about Pandas. Then we went to the zoo and saw some cool tigers (no pandas, bummer.). We wrote about our zoo adventure and put together our lapbook about China including the China flag and maps. (Matty loves doing that.)
We never got around to our lantern making and dragon parade on Friday- instead I slept in (until 7:30 ahhhh) while the kids watched Kung Fu Panda. :) Jack Black fat jokes are so educational!