Summer School Topic 1 Culminating Activities

Well, after not a little fighting, whining, and yes, learning, our first summer school theme is complete. Thank God. I nearly didn't make it. Bless all those homeschoolers who toil on throughout the school year; I do not know how they do it. Finding topics and fun activities isn't the problem. Having earnest conversations with people about little known and perhaps boring (analemmatic sundials, anyone?) topics isn't the problem. Stopping summer school involving brother-and-sisterly-love from becoming alternative placement programming would be the number one problem. We almost didn't survive the teasing, taunting, and bickering. That aside, it was a good first theme.

After settling down, Ethan and Meghan picked their spelling words, and wrote sentences, similar to their school year assignments. They also practiced some random math facts that they selected - Ethan choosing 6's, 7's, and 8's multiplication tables and Meghan some triple digit subtraction.

Then we got into the nitty gritty. Meghan began to take some data on the daily comics, reading them all for several days, circling the ones she liked and crossing out the ones she didn't like or understand. Then we took her data and made a bar graph:

(Peanuts, Hagar the Horrible, The Phantom, Zits, and The Family Circus)

We did a little online research, and discovered the current longest running comic was the Katzenjammer Kids, and that and the actual longest comic (yes, that was what she meant, not the longest running, but the longest, physically) is one that was created for the London Comedy Festival and was on display in Trafalgar Square; it was 88 meters long. Peanuts, Meghan's favorite, is the longest told by one person, at 17897 strips.

Meghan's final activity was to make her own comics:

Cute, no? Slippy the Babydoll and her adventures feature prominently in many stories and drawings of Meghan's.

Ethan drew his own ideas for a candle clock and a water clock:

Ok, I think I get the candle clock. However, the water clock leaves a little to be desired, in that I don't think he got the connection between how fast the water runs and how fast the hands on the clock go around. Dry in the summer and the days are longer? Maybe, but I don't think that's the level of understanding we were going for. . .

Then Ethan did some research on timekeeping in general. After choosing a timekeeping instrument (the astrolabe), and after reading a chapter from The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon (yes, my favorite book series, why do you ask??) in which a Revolutionary War-era family receives an astrolabe, he began writing a fictional story of his own titled The Cursed Astrolabe, using what he learned about the history of time keeping.

**Insert The Cursed Astrolabe here

in APPROX. THREE WEEKS

including whining time**

Ethan suggested we make a fieldtrip out of visiting a museum in London in which the oldest working clock is displayed, as well as Trafalgar Square to visit the longest comic, but I think we'll need to pass on that, barring some heroic fundraising on their part. . .