Teaching With the Arts

Well I forgot to take pictures, so I apologize. What do you consider to be the Arts? I consider music, cooking, drawing, painting, and writing to all be forms of Art. We use Art to learn a lot. It is my favorite way to teach. DJ especially likes to write. So he gets a lot of writing assignments. For example, right now, he is writing a blog post on becoming a knight. Unfortunately I should have put a word limit on his assignment, because he has been writing it for over a week now. I told him I would have to start doing that, and he was not happy at all. So, what do I do? I know in high school and college he is going to get assignments with word limits. I don't want to squash his creativity, but the assignment was not to write a short story. What would you do?

Caitlin has been learning about Ancient Civilizations, and is currently on China. Today, she got to make dinner, using foods that ancient Chinese may have eaten. Now we tweaked it a little bit, because I wanted everyone to eat. Of course you know rice is a huge staple of the Chinese diet. So, she made a version of fried rice, without too much frying. It had sauteed peppers and onions in it, and it was delicious. Garlic, salt and a little bit of sugar were the flavors she used. Then she made oven fried chicken using french fried onions as the coating. Again, normally I would put the chicken right in the rice, but no one will eat it this way, except me, I love it. I wish I had some baby corn to throw in there as well. To round it out she made a toss salad, which is not really a staple of a Chinese diet, but they do eat a lot of vegetables, mostly steamed. Since we don't eat hardly any fish, we didn't even attempt that. All in all she had a ball, and really thought she was a big girl getting to cut up everything, coat the chicken and run the oven.

Yesterday, for a Science experiment we put bread, an orange, and a apple slice into a ziploc bag and set it out in the sun. It will stay there until next week when we will inspect it. She is doing this to see what molds, fungi or other bacteria will grow. I might have her repeat it in the Winter to see that it takes longer to rot when it is cooler out.

That is our activities so far this week. We painted Cardinals this week, and if you would like to see it head over to Melissas Jewelry and Gems.