Learning by doing

Today the official subjects of study were Spelling, Home Economics, PE, and Math. OK, actually Cameron only did Spelling Time today and the rest of the time was spent at 4-H but man was it an educational day!

Today was the first day of my new cooking project for kids under 9. I was nervous, but it went so well. The parents were really there to guide and help and the recipes were simple enough that the kids - even the four year olds - really could do them. And to top it off, the food was great! We had tons of leftovers too so people were coming in from all over the 4-H center to taste, lol. We made spaghetti with homemade pesto and rosemary focaccia. Yum. Cameron and his friend T6 said that the pesto looked disgusting. Cameron hates anything green - ironic since green is his favorite color. Anyway, I made him try one bite and he absolutely shocked himself by loving it, lol. He loved it so much he ate three bowls. So that was Home Ec and a bit of Daring (what subject does that fall under?).

PE was covered by our lovely friend, MomS, who spontaneously organized some games during the down times. Yay her! That was an absolute life saver.

Math came not through workbooks and not through cooking. Math came from Cameron peeking into the next room at the 4-H center into the Foam Weaponry Project meeting where they were calculating hit points for different mythological creatures (it's some strange fantasy warcraft thing, don't ask me). Anyway there was a white board up with a list of characters, some associated numbers, and then those numbers multiplied by ten. Totally out of the blue, Cam comes up to me and says, "Did you know that three times ten is thirty?" Um, yeah. "Did you know that 90 times 10 is 900?" Um, again, yeah... but how did you? LOL. He definitely had his "times tens" down. I even tried to stump him with 9000 times 10, after he told me what 900 times 10 was, and he only paused to ask what came after 9000. I said, 9001. ;) So my sly little man said, "Then what comes after 9,999?" Can't fool him! Have I mentioned that we only barely touched on multiplication a little bit last year? The last third of this math book is multiplication and division but we are ages away from that. Looks like we are unschooling math here, lol. My park friends will be proud. ;)