Preschool: Africa study + recent events

After we left Europe, we went to Africa! This has been a fun unit.

I appreciated how the curriculum introduced several different parts of Africa. A lot of kids (and many adults) consider Africa to sort of be one giant country with the same culture all throughout it. I thought the curriculum did a fairly good job of focusing on different cultures throughout the continent.

Instead of reading one or two longer books, we read several short ones, including Jambo Means Hello: A Swahili Alphabet; Africa is Not a Country; and The Day of Ahmed's Secret. In addition, we read several folktales from Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales. 

While we read Jambo Means Hello, we made our own alphabet book of things from American culture, which was a lot of fun! Rhonda helped think of words and did all the illustrations. (I supplied words when she couldn't think of any.) I think the book turned out very cute.

In the book The Day of Ahmed's Secret (spoiler alert!), the main character, who lives in Egypt, learns to write his name. So Rhonda practiced writing her name afterward. Actually, as far as I can remember, this was the first time she'd ever tried writing her name. For a first attempt, I think she did a really good job!

She's gotten very interested in writing since then. When we made her goals for Primary, she said she wanted to learn to write and she's been taking it pretty seriously! She has a lot of fun practicing the letters. She's written her name lots of times since then and can pretty much do it on her own (sometimes she needs help remembering which letter comes next). This is a somewhat recent attempt, although her writing has gotten neater since I took this picture.

I'm proud of her for trying so hard. I think it's interesting to see the different experiences she's had with reading versus writing. Unfortunately, I think I've pushed her too much with reading in the past. I'm not doing that anymore, but I think it's put her off wanting to read a little bit. However, I've never pressured her to learn to write. And now she's really interesting in it! It's completely fun for her. This is a good learning experience for me. I know that she will eventually be interested in reading. But it really helps me back off when I see that she can motivate herself to learn something, even something hard like writing. (And if she keeps up with what she's doing, the writing practice will definitely help her learn to read without her even knowing it!)

During our Africa study, we subscribed to CuriosityStream, which is a documentary streaming service. We got a year for $12, which was so cheap it almost seemed silly not to try it! So we've been watching documentaries sometimes. Usually Doug will watch them after he gets home from work, since he likes documentaries a lot. The kids usually don't pay a lot of attention, but sometimes Rhonda will sit and watch with him.

Rhonda has developed quite an interest in science. I think it partly comes from watching shows like StoryBots and Magic School Bus, and listening to the Wow in the World podcast, but I also think it's a natural interest for her. It's exciting to see her develop her own interests! I've been trying to encourage it and give her some fun new ways to learn without putting any pressure on her.

When she saw the SuperBowl commercial about female astronauts, she said she wanted to be an astronaut. She's also been talking a lot about space and asking questions about it. So I got some books out of the library. Her favorite is "The Biggest, Baddest Book of Space" (which seems like an inaccurate name to me, because it's actually a pretty small book). She really likes learning about the stars and planets. We've also been reading a couple of other books about astronauts, and I bought a book at the library called "My First Book About Space" that she's been really enjoying.

I saw a book of 365 Science Experiments for Kids at Aldi for just a few bucks, so I picked it up and we've been doing some of the astronomy experiments. I don't love the book and would like to find one that clearly explains the results of the experiments better (I'm open to suggestions!), but it's been a lot of fun to flip through it and find some ways for Rhonda to learn. Here are some of the experiments we've done:

For understanding gravity and the Earth's orbit around the sun, we tied a small toy bucket to a string and swung it around in a circle. Then we put water in the bucket to see what would happen. Rhonda was pretty impressed that it didn't fall out!

For another gravity experiment, we tested how things fall to the earth. We got a penny and cut out a penny-sized piece of tissue paper and dropped them. The penny fell first. Then we put both the penny and the tissue paper in identical containers and dropped them, and noticed that even though they were different weights, they landed at the same time. We had fun finding other things to drop and watch everything hit the ground at the same time.

To learn about the movement of the sun/earth, we blew up a balloon and drew our country on it. (Rhonda just drew a circle.) I let her hold a flashlight in the dark room and told her to hold it still, then I slowly rotated the balloon so we could see the sun "rising" and "setting" on our little earth.

She always gets so excited about our experiments! It's fun to plan them.

In dance class, the kids got parties in their classes on Valentine's Day. They had a great time and loved the little props. Sierra is getting better and better at participating. She seems to prefer the more organized activities over free dance (the apple doesn't fall far...). Rhonda is getting very good at using the skills in her dance class. They always learn routines in addition to the other things that they do, and right now they're learning a dance to the song in Frozen 2, "When You're Older" (Olaf's song). Rhonda adores the dance and is actually very good at it! She used to have a very hard time learning the routines.

We had one single day of snow in January! Rhonda was very excited about it, but unfortunately, we couldn't do much with it because by the time we got up in the morning, it had mostly turned to ice. There was a little bit of powdery snow on the fence where the sun hadn't shone yet, so I used that to make a tiny snowman. The girls didn't want to touch the snow. It was melted by noon.

The other big things that have happened recently are our big home library renovation and Rhonda's birthday party. This post is getting long so I think I'll do separate posts for those things.