Quick trip update!

It's our last full day in Chicago! I'm online at the Apple store, posting a quick summary of the trip so far:

Museums/points of interest visited: Shedd Aquarium, Museum of Science and Industry, Institute of Art, Millennium Park, Buckingham Fountain

Exotic cuisines tasted: genuine Mexican food (that didn't look at all like what the kids expected!), Russian/Eastern European food (a huge success, from the blinis to the chopped liver), sushi, and Chicago deep dish pizza

Private learning experiences: The children cooked spring rolls, chicken and vegetable stir fry, and candy sushi—delicious!

We are tired, but what fun we've had! We'll be back tomorrow...

Beautiful writing

Over the last week (and continuing) in Language Arts, our class has been focusing on descriptive, eloquent, articulate, affecting writing. The children were given the choice of writing a paragraph (complete with proper sentences, correct spelling and punctuation, etc.) on one of four topics:

1) something that you're excited about,

2) something that scares you,

3) something you love, or

4) something beautiful.

After rough drafts, and editing, the children are writing their final drafts on special paper in their best handwriting. Some of the writing I'm seeing is astonishingly expressive and passionate. The topics range from beautiful or dangerous tropical locales, to favorite stuffed animals, to the slow dragging of time until the start of summer vacation. It's wonderful to see the children inspired to put their efforts toward creating writing that will convey to their readers exactly how they feel.

Slope

In math, recently, I've been working with the children in both my math group and Jesse's on the concept of slope. This is not something that is covered in the Singapore books, and it came about because some of my students had questions about the section on parallel and perpendicular lines in the 4B books. I started explaining how to draw parallel lines on a grid... and then thought, "Why not take this just a little farther and really talk about coordinate grids and finding the slope of a line?" That line of thought took us farther than I expected, into the land of formulas and Greek symbols: Δy/Δx is now a familiar set of symbols in the classroom, and we all know that it stands for the change in y (subtracting one y coordinate point from another), divided by the change in x (subtracting the corresponding x coordinates). While I'm not good at figuring out how to type mathematical formulae, here is the formula as it's properly written:

The children have been doing wonderfully. It's an interesting topic to study with children who are at this math level, because on the one hand there are a lot of new concepts to assimilate (coordinate planes, axes, plotting coordinate points, even discussions of different dimensions), and on the other, the math skills required are not beyond anyone's reach. It's been challenging in some ways, but the kids have risen to the challenge. They've practiced finding coordinate points, drawing coordinate grids, finding the slope of various straight lines, and creating challenging slope problems for their classmates. With Jesse, they've measured the slope fo their own bodies in various positions. They've even begun speculating on what it would take to find the slope of a curved line... and that's gotten them all excited about studying calculus, one day!