Galileo

The business of the past few months had made me sink into the text- workbook routine. The children I find no longer go beyond what I ask them to do. They just want to finish up quickly whatever work we are doing so they can get back to playing. In fact the children challenge each other who finishes first. That's not a very healthy competition.

That is why I finally pushed myself today to sit down and look through a book to use as a base for our new theme ' Galileo'. To make myself get back to coming up with a theme to encourage the kids, I got over the mental barrier of planning in detail but to just go with the flow about what I know the kids like from experience.

Galileo's Leaning Tower Experiment by Wendy Macdonald tells the tale of how a farm boy got acquainted with Galileo as he was throwing stones over a bridge to find out how fast they go which later grew to them experimenting about forces.I will be linking the book, which I will be reading in parts over five days, to history (Galileo/mathematicians), mensuration, Renaissance Art, physics, geography (Italy/Europe) and Language Arts.

A natural progression would be thinking about field trips and projects which I will think more about based on the directions given by the children.