Several days before his birthday he woke up to find a map from "The Birthday Faeries", directing him down to the train station parking lot. The map was in a series of 7 or 8 maps, each one building on the one before. He told Papa-Bug what the directions were and we drove him to the train station. At the station, he found a package with train tickets to Seattle and a Seattle Map in it. Away we went. We brought our compass. In Seattle we got several other maps - tourist maps and whatnot. We used these maps to find out where the Godmommies live, and how close they are to things we could see (like The Space Needle). When we got home I found a topographical map of the Seattle area and we compared the maps to one another - one showed a small area of Seattle, one a larger area, the road map showed a LOT more, the topo map didn't show us roads, etc.
On the train, listening to tunes, impatient to get there... |
I had planned some math exercises involving distance, but he did those on his own. I found him with his puzzle, tracing his finger across different routes: "North Carolina is over here and it is so far away. Minnesota is here and it is closer..." and so on. He was doing such a good job counting states, comparing size and shape, exploring distance, and so on, that I didn't feel a need to interfere with the natural math lesson happening in front of me.
One of the best projects we did was so simple. In the morning, we traced Brother-Bug's shadow with chalk on the driveway. The shadow was pointing West. Again in the afternoon we traced the shorter and North facing shadow. In the evening, the East facing shadow. It was very easy and a simple way to teach direction and the sun's movement. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture before it rained and washed our project away.
Easy map making for a 5-year old. |
Look at those piano-playing hands! |
So those are the high points of our September. Of course, we read related books, found relevant websites, and all the rest. Learning to use a compass proved to be too tricky for us right now, so we will save that for another adventure. Now, on to Weather and Seasons in October! We'll be making our own barometer, among other things.
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