Leaf me in the sunlight

I kind of got really hooked on 'The Sun Mother ' story from ' The Barefoot Book of Earth Tales'; today we read the part of the story on the sun's mothering of the plants on earth again. Thereafter, I presented ' The parts of the Leaf' to Ihsan and we related the parts to the actual leaves we have from Tuesday's leaf printing session.

While doing this, the juniors did the leaf and tree puzzle and looked at books.

From there, I read ' Catching Sunlight' by Susan Blackaby to introduce the children to the leaves' important work of making food and producing oxygen for the rest of the world. Ihsan later did a concept map on parts of the leaf and photosynthesis.

I then read ' We are extremely very good recyclers' by Lauren Child and 'Lost in the Snow' from the Magic School Bus series on request by the juniors. We then did guided reading of ' We Like Kites' from The Berenstein Bears series ; our book for this fortnight.

Sofiyya is into quantification and we have done red rods, sandpaper numbers and cards and counters. Since she likes pictures of girls in pretty dresses so much, I found a book with such pretty pictures of children, plants and animals that look like its from the turn of the century era called ' 1 is One' by Tasha Tudor. Of course, Umayr wanted in too.

I then did bookmarks with Umayr with snowflake patterns; combination of the morning reading session of ' Amelia Bedelia the Bookworm' and the Magic School Bus' 'Lost in Snow'. He was so into it, he made two and some other figures with the remaining paper.

It's so different from sitting down trying to make him do some 'schoolwork'. I am thinking of letting 'schoolwork' go for the moment and do more hands on like this which still adresses the skills that he needs to learn in a non-literary way which I think is much like what Eisner was talking about when he talked about communicating understanding through alternative avenues like the arts.

Some of the things we want to explore is creating a recycling corner at home with a plant to buy when we reach a certain target; inspired from the book ' We are extremely very good recyclers'. Something else we can extend from today's lessons is exploring snowflakes something that can connect with the water theme we did the fortnight before.

This turned out to be an ok week after all. One more day to go, I still have a long list we can do with the sun theme.