Trail of tears, trail of beads, and trail of light

So this week we studied the Trail of tears and native suffering.  Holy cow that was a really depressing episode in US history.  I could hardly finish reading a children's book about Chief Joseph to my kids.  But to help embed the history into my children's brains we made beaded necklaces and the next day we made dreamcatchers.

I found this big container of beads at Walmart that had the coolest beads ever (for little kids.)  It had bear beads, star beads, heart, shell, and even elephant beads.  A bit of a mess, but really fun.

I looked everywhere, but I couldn't find any hoops to make dreamcatchers from…so I just bought dreamcatchers, cut out the middle, untied the feathers, and then my boys reweaved the middle, and retied the feathers.  They actually loved it and did the weaving without too much help, but Maxwell was really disappointed when he found out that they don't actually catch your dreams.

This science day I was a little out of sync with my groove.  I was a bit stressed.  We talked about light and cameras.  I think most of it was too complex for my crowd.  In fact, at one point one little boy said "this is getting complicated" ya….but we did actually prove that light travels straight  and we also ended up making zoetropes that WORKED!

We went to the discovery zone for field trip….Maxwell was so excited to show the museum off to his cousins since he had already been there.

For math we've been doing this sort of poke-a-dot adding thing that I made up with magnets and metal washers on numbers.  It kind of goes against the theories of abacus math, but hey now they'll know more then one technique.