Quilting

We spent last week busy making "quilts" with the information the kids researched about a few countries in Asia. This weekend we sewed them together and they turned out great. If I get an extra moment, I'll take a picture with them and post it. They each researched six different countries and made a quilt block for each country. They had to write a paragraph about what a person might see if they went to the country, include a picture of a person from there, a map of the country, what a typical house would look like there, and an animal that would be found there. Then we printed them onto t-shirt transfer paper and ironed them onto fabric that we sewed onto a big piece of felt.

Today we cried our way through the end of "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes." Then we spent some time talking about war, and why it was important that Americans read a book like this. They also designed and made models of their own peace monuments and researched the Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima, Japan that was erected in memory of Sadako. After all that we all decided we liked adventure or comedy books better.

The rest of this week will be spent wrapping up the unit on Asia and Africa. Next week is Geology!! I'm really looking forward to that unit. They'll be doing some of the same things I had to do in college lab classes...testing hardness values, etc. For the literature portion we'll be reading "Holes."

In the car today Aiden told us that he thought learning made more technologies and bigger cultures. When I asked him why he thought that he said, "because if you're studying about one thing, and then you come up with a brilliant idea from something else you know, you could create a whole new thing. That is what makes better technology." He didn't get to the part about bigger cultures, but I'm interested to hear what he means about that too.