Sunday, October 21, 2012

School's back with the Industrial Revolution

Being surrounded by good books (I acquired a library card here in Idaho) I can now comfortably resume school regardless of location.

This week we started learning about the industrial revolution.  We learned how it was a time of factories and inventions.

I asked Maxwell to go find some junk and make an invention.  I unleashed a giant.  Maxwell is always building something, but with the little nudge from me, he was in creation heaven.  He got his cousin on board and started inventing Robots that "have never been in this world before" which is Maxwell's definition of an invention.



And Hyrum, whose interests slightly differ, created with another cousin, the costume invention of a Halloween King:


We also talked about trains and their importance in the industrial revolution, and they each got a new train toy (sometimes a new toy is enough of an activity.)


A cute informative picture book about Steam engine trains is "Jingle the Brass."

And we talked about how prevalent child labor was during that time and how bad the working conditions were. A good book that will make you cry is "Working Children" by Saller.  Our activity was to watch Newsies!  Newsies was my favorite movie as a tween----Christian Bale back when he did musicals ahhhh---Dustin mentioned batman, and they were waiting the entire movie for this New York cowboy to turn into batman.  Sorry boys.


We read a children's book, "Kid Blink Beats The World," that tells the real story of the Newsies as well.

We went to co-op again.  Maxwell goes to a Knights of Freedom class where they are learning about John Audubon, and a World class where they learned about Ireland.  All the boys go to an art class, and Hyrum and Daniel go to a nature class and animal class (story times basically.)

Not sure what playing marbles has to do with Audubon but I came in and took a picture anyway.


2 comments:

  1. We have a Knights of Freedom group out here by me...What exactly is it?? :)

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    1. Knights of Freedom is the boy equivalent to Liberty Girls or whatever they call the girl's club that studies the American Girl series.

      They study children's chapter books that resemble the American Girl series but are boyish, but it's up to who ever is in charge of the group what those books exactly are. Then they have activities to go with it.

      They have levels like "squire" "paige" and "knight" according to age and stuff. They also have a regional knight tournament where tons of boys in costumes come with nerf swords and dual it out.

      I might have to start a chapter in Canada one of these days!

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