Weekly Wrap-Up: China

Weeks like this make me love homeschooling!  The complaining was minimal, we completed everything we had planned for the week, and Emily loved it all!

The Three Rs:

Emily amazed me this week with her reading!  I think it is all starting to click.   I have actually found her under the covers with a flashlight reading the past couple of nights.  Makes me so proud ~ the reading, not the staying up late!

She is moving along quickly with Math-U-See Beta.  I have noticed that we need to work some more on time and money. 

Geography Song:

Both of the kids learned the Asia Song from the CD, Geography Songs ~ which is fantastic!  My kids can learn anything if you put it to music.

Tangrams:

We read Grandfather Tang’s Story:  A Tale Told With Tangrams.  Emily and I loved this story.  It is about Grandfather Tang who tells his granddaughter a tale about two shape-changing fox fairies.  The fox fairies try to outdo each other—becoming different animals chasing each other.  When the two chase each other right into danger, they finally have to set their competition aside and pull together.  

The book includes a pattern for the tangrams that I enlarged and printed for Emily

so she could make the animals as we read the book.

Lapbook:  The Empty Pot

We read the book The Empty Pot.  Love the moral of this story! 

Ping is a Chinese boy with an emerald green thumb; he can make anything grow "as if by magic." One day the Emperor announces that he needs a successor, someone who can carry on after he is gone with the ruling of the kingdom and the growing of the flowers. He gives each child one seed, and the one who grows the best flower will take over after him. Competition is fierce, and Ping is heartbroken that nothing comes up, despite his careful tending. On the day of the competition, he is the only child with an empty pot; all the others brings lush plants. But the Emperor has tricked everyone by distributing cooked seeds, unable to grow; and Ping, with his empty pot, is the only honest gardener--and the winner. Extraordinarily delicate Oriental landscapes in round frames show Chinese architecture, foliage, native birds and clothing in a delightful way. And the story contains an important lesson on the worth of individual strength and honesty.

I printed The Empty Pot Lapbook from Homeschool Share and Emily put together the entire thing together in one day.

       Art:

Emily used watercolor pencils to draw cherry blossoms and then blended them with water.  This is the first time we have used watercolor pencils and we are having fun playing with them.  That is her name written in Chinese on the side. 

   

 Culture:

Emily really enjoyed watching this Ribbon Dance.  The little girl, Catherine Yang, is nine years old.

Of course Emily then had to perform her own ribbon dance.  It’s not as easy as it looks to get the ribbons to dance!

     

We also listen to some Chinese music.  We loved the beautiful pictures in this video and the soothing music.  Not sure why they decided to put a picture of Jackie Chan fighting in the video? 

Chinese Moon Festival:

Thursday we celebrated the Chinese Moon Festival.  You can read more about it here.

We made Chinese paper lanterns and Chinese Moon Cakes.

As the sun was setting we enjoyed tea and Moon Cakes before we went outside to look at beautiful harvest moon.

Our Book Basket:

• The Story about Ping
• A Grain of Rice
• The Empty Pot
• The Moon Lady
• Grandfather Tang’s Story
• Children Like Me
• Kid’s World Atlas

I hope everyone else had one of those “I love to homeschool” kind of weeks!  Visit Kris at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers to see what other homeschoolers have been doing this week.

~Cindy