Magic Treehouse and India

Well, even though we are still learning about India, our Magic Treehouse book studies have moved on to #19, Dingoes at Dinnertime.  As you can probably figure out from the title, this book takes Jack and Annie to Australia, a country/continent that we've already studied in full.  So, we kept up our India unit, and spent just a small amount of time on the Treehouse book.

Language Arts:

Writing, sans lines,  true and false statements about Australia learned from reading Dingoes at Dinnertime.

True:
Australia is the only continent that is also a country.
Kangaroos throw their joey when chased by dingos.
Australia's forests go through times of drought.

False:
The emu is a large bird that flies.
Koalas always drink.
A drought is when a lot of rain falls.

Sawyer reading his Dear Dragon book, "Play Play Play Dear Dragon."

Handwriting without Tears workbook.
(I really don't know why we keep doing this book.  He doesn't need to.  But I think he just enjoys the coloring).

More reading aloud.  :)

Math:

Sawyer worked on recording hundreds.

Lots of Hundreds with place value cards, the abacus, and abacus tiles.

He also did a few part-whole circle sets with word problems.

We all played "Go to the Dump", similar to "Go Fish" but having to find pairs that add up to 10.

The boys had a good time with this game.

This is how Sawyer looks at his cards because he can't fan them out without them falling all over the place.

Then Hayden got a little introduction to multiplication. 

His worksheet on the first day of learning some multiplication.

His second worksheet on multiplication.  Here, he had to look at the number of beads
in a row, and how many rows there were.  Then he had to formulate an addition equation
and multiplication equation to show how many beads were there.

And finally, Sawyer started adding tens and ones together.

After writing the first part of the equation, Sawyer would move the abacus beads over to show
the total amount, complete the equation, and find the place value cards that matched.

India:

This is (mostly) our last week of studying India.  We will be having our Indian dinner next Monday night since it's Memorial Day and I'll have all day to work on it rather than getting all flustered at the end of a long week and trying to scramble it all together Friday night.  We read a lot of good books, learned about a different religion, and had a blast with creating our own little version of the Holi Festival in our backyard.  Fun!

The books we read:
I is for India by Prodeepta Das
Children Just Like Me by Barnabas and Anabel Kingsley
Places of Worship: Hindu Mandir byAngela Wood
This is my Faith: Hinduism by Holly Wallace
Gopal the Infallible by Sita Gilbakian
A Very Special New Year: An Adventure in India by Disney's Small World Library
Little Krishna by Harish Johari
How Ganesh Got His Elephant Head by Harish Johari and Vatsala Sperling

We set up an Indian style sitting area for reading some of our books.

The boys learned about the colors and smells of some of India's spices.

We tasted chai tea.  Sawyer wasn't very keen on it.

Hayden liked it, though. 

We learned about Diwali and created some colored salts to make rangoli designs.

After laying out a vinyl tablecloth on the floor, the boys drew designs on mini paper plates.

Then, we filled sections of their designs with glue and sprinkled the colored salts over it.

The glue absorbed a LOT of the salt, causing the colors to actually bleed into other areas.
Unfortunately, the end result was not pretty.  In hindsight, we should've used sand instead
of salt, but I thought it would be fun to do it this way.  Oh well.

Holi powder for the Holi Festival

This is where the real fun began!

The boys demolished what little powder we had.

Even the dog didn't escape the fun! 

Their faces crack me up.

What hands look like after throwing powder.

What faces look like after throwing powder.

I let them throw the plates up in the air once we got down to the last little bit.

That didn't stop them from rubbing the plates all over each other afterwards.

Blue headed boy.

Green headed boy.  

I don't know if I can top that kind of fun again.  They are already asking me if we can get some more Holi powder so we can do it again!  And, they want to go to India.  :)

Tigers at Twilight

This week our new Magic Treehouse book took us to India, and because of that, I decided that our Little Passports would take us there as well.  So, we got a double dose of the country, and we are just getting started.  There is so much about the country of India that we could do things with and learn about, but I'm going to have to limit it as we are drawing our school year to a close, and we still have South Africa to venture to as well.

To begin with, I'll cover what we did in math this week:

Hayden worked on mentally adding tens.

Sawyer and I played "Go to the Dump" to work on numbers adding up to 10.

Sawyer making numbers with the abacus and matching them up to place value cards.

Creating abacus paper beads to match place value numbers he assembled.

Hayden and I played Memory with skip counting cards.  He had to find each number in
the correct order.

Hayden using a Chinese checker board to find ways of counting without actually
"counting" individual dots.

Sawyer making 100 with tiles to match the abacus.

And then making 200 with the tiles.

Using abacus tiles to extend the hundreds.

Learning to visualize 100s.

And now for Magic Treehouse and the country of India.....

After reading Tigers at Twilight, we looked for India on the big wall map.

Then we opened our package from Little Passports.

Sawyer loved the baby stuffed tiger that they sent us.  (Now you see why I decided
to do the country of India with our Magic Treehouse book!)

We got our boarding pass to go online and play some games.

Hayden put the flag sticker in our passport.

Then we added the map pin sticker to the Little Passports map.

I wrote a series of events from the book on paper strips, and the boys had to
put them in the correct order that they occurred in the story.

Sawyer had to write and illustrate ONE thing that he learned about tigers.

Hayden researched a little more on tigers and found three interesting things about tigers
that he could use in a persuasive "essay" from the tiger's point of view.

That big graphic organizer to his left was what he used to help section out his thoughts.
We didn't use the whole thing because it gets a little advanced, and I didn't want to scare
him away from writing.  

This was his final product.  Messy, but hey.  Don't kill tigers.  :)
"Don't kill tigers because we are endangered.  I am important to the ecosystem.  I am India's national animal.
I do not eat people by nature.  Tigers like me should be saved from hunters.  If I'm not protected, my species
will disappear in 20 years."

Then, of course, we put the map of India in our notebooks, and we colored in the country
of India on the map of Asia.

The boys colored the flag of India, and added it to their notebooks as well.

Then, I printed out a dot-to-dot of an elephant.  Sawyer's was numbered 1-35.

For Hayden, I whited out the numbers and rewrote them as multiples of 3.