A school of fish

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Ancient Civilizations Homeschool Unit

This was the second of only TWO units this school year! Of course there was a lot of other school around the edges. But these two were both just huge units, and honestly, it was quite fun to dive SO deeply and for SO long into these topics. We felt quite experts by the time we were done.

I haven't ever taught or even learned about several of these Ancient Civilizations before, and it was great to do it along with our study of the Old Testament because I finally felt like I understood (at least a little) what was going on with the Hittites and the Amorites and all the warring tribes and other civilizations rising and falling and carrying the Jews away captive and so forth. I've never understood any of that before!

Because this was kind of a history survey (we used Story of the World, Vol. 1 as a loose spine), we didn't delve into each civilization as much as we could have. They have a lot in common, though, and I hope to revisit some of the most interesting ones. We have studied Ancient Egypt before, and it's one of my favorite units! But I'd love to do separate unit studies of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome as well. Maybe we'll get to Rome during our New Testament studies!

Here's my old Pinterest board for Ancient Egypt (I didn't make a new board this time, but we did some of these same activities, and some new ones): https://www.pinterest.com/marilynnielson/ancient-egypt-homeschool-unit/

We also watched these videos about some of the first civilizations:

• From hunter-gatherer to Farmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teavjYI9pdM&t=97s

• Human Prehistory 101 (part 3), Agriculture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVHD9wGlbho

I want to write down one of the children's favorite activities before I forget it. It was something I made up on the spur of the moment, but they loved it and wanted to play it over and over! We did this activity after a discussion of archaeology and how archeologists interpret the past.

1. Divide into two teams. One is the Ancient People. One is the Archaeologists.

2. The Ancient People go around the house collecting random objects (stuffed animals, cooking utensils, blankets, clothing, wood scraps, whatever). Then they take their objects outside and hide them around the yard. They decide upon a story for what they are doing. E.g.: "These people worshiped bunnies. They lived near water and traveled in boats. They fought with neighboring tribes and died of a plague." They hide the objects in such a way as to reveal what they can about these details. They take note of how many objects they hid.

3. The Archaeologists go around the yard and find the "artifacts." Once they have found them all, they try to say as many details as they can about the life of the Ancient People. They try to guess how they lived and how they died.

4. Switch teams and play again!

Monday, February 21, 2022

Music Unit Celebration

We had a fun celebration at the end of our enormous Music Unit. It felt like we needed to do something good to celebrate learning so much stuff. :)

I must say that the Kit-Kat piano keyboard (with all 88 keys) was the biggest hit. Daisy assembled it for me. I was worried at the last moment that I wouldn't be able to find white Kit-kats at the store, but I finally did—whew!

The rest of the menu was:

• Bugles

• Those little flute-shaped cookies, whatever they're called. (EDIT: Piroulines!)

• Music notes made of meat (this was Sam's idea—bacon, salami, and sausage sticks make a nice music note)

• Music notes made of cherry tomatoes and basil and olives and mozzarella balls (these were my favorites)

• Music notes made of cherry sour candies and toothpicks

• Drum mallets made of pretzels and marshmallows (we stuck them together with homemade caramel sauce)

• Black-and-white make-your-own piano-key sandwiches (we just had turkey and ham and roast beef on white and pumpernickel bread)

I put out some musical instruments to play: this tiny steel drum and this little thumb piano.

I also got a conducting baton for each of the children, and a tiny egg maraca. (These batons broke way too easily, but these have lasted well!)

We played some "Name-that-tune" sorts of games, and watched the Fred Astaire movie "Shall We Dance," the one with such great music by Gershwin in it. It was so fun!

The conductor's batons got a lot of use over the next few weeks :)

Daisy made a cardboard music stand to use with hers.

The Calico Critters got in on the musical action too.

Even Gussie liked to lead "mine concert"!

Monday, October 18, 2021

Music History Unit

This year has been a funny one! It started out with the birth of our sweet baby Clementine—on the first day of school! (Public school, anyway.) We had been banking up school time during the previous year and summer so I could feel fine about taking a nice long break for the baby. When we did start school again, I decided to start with something I could put together easily and without a ton of preparation time, so I chose to do a Music History Unit.

I majored in Music in college, so I have a lot of resources—CDs and textbooks, and a pretty good grasp of the overall scope of Music History, so I hoped all I'd need to do was request some library books and find good recordings of the pieces I wanted to discuss.

It ended up being a MONSTER Unit, over twelve weeks long, because we first studied Sound—then Instruments—then Musical Eras and Composers—then Musical Genres—and even got to ballet and opera and movie music by the end. It was pretty comprehensive! And it was lots of fun. It took a bit longer than I'd planned, but it was, as I'd hoped, just the right thing for a unit right after having a baby: lots of opportunities for just sitting in my bed and listening and talking, and not too many heavily involved crafts or projects.

A few of the activities we did do are on my Pinterest page, here: https://www.pinterest.com/marilynnielson/music-unit/

I can't even possibly link to all the videos we watched—basically I chose representative music from each era and highlighted composers, and we listened to sometimes several versions of one piece. I pulled from my faithful old Norton Scores from college, but also other music in our collection, or Apple Music. We also watched lots of video recordings because it's so instructive to SEE the music being played. (It would have been great to go to more concerts during this unit, but there were still lots of Covid closures plus the aforementioned new baby, so we didn't really get to.)

Anyway, I went through my YouTube History and tried to pull out videos that we liked especially, but I'm sure I missed a bunch. But I'll link some of them here:

• What does a vibraphone sound like?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkBu7Om6Bd4 (there were a whole bunch of these instrument/timbre videos on the Utah Symphony page and they were quite good; you can find the rest here:

https://www.youtube.com/c/UtahSymphonyUtahOpera/videos?view=0&sort=p&shelf_id=0)

• Other videos about each instrument in the orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLALV7z7CDQ7yCWoOvUK4mOMAE4ub_h0TG

• How vinyl records are made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq5EDXNe-HQ&t=131s

• History of recorded sound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mb6y_s1QQc&t=220s

• How do microphones work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_crXXbuEKE

• Can you hear me now?: How microphones work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MaH5V0UomE

• Sound and waves demonstrations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De1J2V0Cta4

• Electron microscope and the path of the needle in a vinyl LP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUDclkJpMfo

• Note by note: The Making of a Steinway Piano. This is a one-hour documentary we really liked—we've watched it before, during our Percussion Unit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rAhps4AkT8

• That Sound and Percussion Unit is summarized in these posts, and goodness! It seems like it happened recently, but look at these tiny children!

Benjamin Britten's "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" (I love this and there are many good recordings of it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMGqdUqPnmo

• A very dramatic (and shortened) "Bolero," which the children liked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwLABSm0yYc

• Peter and the Wolf—I mostly chose this because it had some storybook-ish pictures, but there are probably better recordings. Peter and the Wolf is always good, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ueGfjBKbiE&t=1s

• Demonstration of different trumpet mutes—so interesting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9F5DaxIUcQ&t=19s

• This is fun. "Tuba Tiger Rag" by the Canadian Brass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7IraO35qu8

• Demonstration of a celeste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw7HAyq54rw&t=4s

• This one is super cool—"How do vocal cords work when you sing?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2pLJfWUjc8

• A little advanced. Wish I could've found a simpler explanation. "What is a fugue?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAFETgpt9PA&t=157s

• Royal Fireworks Music, with fireworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuG1t2smdCQ

• La Boutique Fantastique, a fun short ballet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_D3JHR8emE

• Dance of the Cygnets, from Swan Lake. The girls were dancing in Swan Lake with their ballet studio for this year, so it was fun to watch a bunch of clips from it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GsajWIF3ws

• Weird opera by Shostakovich, "The Nose." I don't know why we watched these strange tap-dancing noses, but we did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YotMwwixPsw

• The importance of instrumentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEpJZDUwOTI

• Understanding the leitmotif: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR2EobBG9wQ

• A couple fun cartoons that use classical music: "Pink Panther in Pink, Plunk, Plink" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiA6qe5S2wU and "Tom and Jerry: The Cat Concerto" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKZgi06fVsk

• Star Wars Leitmotifs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExbps1JofI

• A history of minimalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3VUeNyGcrQ&t=464s

• Clapping Music—Steve Reich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPU5XrmORCQ

• When film music is funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1Lpqk_3ero

We ended up covering Jazz, Opera, and Ballet during this unit, and each of those could have been a whole unit in themselves—so we just did brief overviews. It would be fun to return to any of them and go more in depth!

We had a couple of great guest speakers—my neighbor taught us about Jazz (she majored in Vocal Jazz in college) and my cousin Heidi gave us a workshop on the pipe organ. Both of those classes were really great. Here are some pictures from the Organ class:

These make me nostalgic because we had Abe with us on this field trip! He was the one taking the pictures. It seems so long ago!

Monday, May 24, 2021

Electricity and Magnetism Unit Study (II)

I decided it was time for another Electricity Unit mostly because Teddy had been asking me tons of questions about electricity, and has also been very fascinated with/scared of (those two things often go together) lightning lately. It was funny to realize that the girls haven't learned any of this either, since we last did this unit in 2014. Malachi claims to remember everything, but he was only 6, so I'm not sure I believe him. But he was like Teddy back then—very curious and inquisitive and serious about learning, and a FULL participant in everything we did, so maybe he does remember!

I also feel like I did a more complete job on this unit the previous time through. Abe and Seb both understood a lot about electricity already, and helped me figure out a lot of things! And they were very excited and eager to do all the activities, which is always helpful. I was surprised how much the girls liked working with the snap circuits, etc., too this time—but they weren't AS fanatical about it as the boys were back then. I think this subject was just of particular interest of both of those older boys!

Here is the pinterest board from 2014, with perhaps a few pins added this time: https://www.pinterest.com/marilynnielson/electricity-and-magnetism-homeschool-unit/

A good place to start when talking about electricity is with the structure of the atom, and by explaining how ions work. Here are the children playing the "pass the electron" game (we do something similar to this one: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/activity/circuits-friends/print/)

Here are some explanatory videos we watched:

Ions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnudaqeTyto
Atoms: https://www.generationgenius.com/videolessons/atoms-and-molecules-video-for-kids/

More activities we did last time: https://nielsonschool.blogspot.com/2014/04/electric-current-conductors-and.html

Luckily, we still had most of our electricity and magnetism supplies from last time. They're great to have around for homeschool in general. Here's the list of supplies I made last time, and links to where to get things. Annoyingly, some links are broken, but a google search for that item usually yields lots of choices.

Here are some other videos we used:

Intro to circuits (beware annoying narrators): https://www.generationgenius.com/videolessons/electricity-and-circuits-video-for-kids/?gclid=CjwKCAjwhMmEBhBwEiwAXwFoEW1-Ub4d055l4boFmt-kvSXoab4mptqupBftaK02wHecFK9qWMYfRhoC76IQAvD_BwE

Make sparks http://www.learnplayimagine.com/2013/04/how-to-make-lightning.html

Slow motion lightning strikes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO3H285CFRo

The electric eel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0M7_HPSi14

Make a telegraph machine https://www.energizer.com/science-center/how-to-make-a-simple-telegraph-set

Virtual coal power plant tour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IKECt4Y3RI
Nuclear power plant tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AdA5d_8Hm0
Hydroelectric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki8kSB1ThJQ
Substation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q-aVBv7PWM

You can learn a lot just by playing around with making your own circuits. The children had a lot of fun doing that in an open-ended way with all the supplies we had. Snap circuits are, of course, fun too, but they don't have the immediacy of a real circuit with a bulb and battery you add in yourself.

More ideas for circuit exploration: https://nielsonschool.blogspot.com/2014/04/simple-foil-circuits-series-and.html

And some further study of switches and resistors: https://nielsonschool.blogspot.com/2014/04/resistors-and-switches.html. That link includes an explanation of three-way switches, which I had forgotten and had to relearn this time. Here's Daisy giving another explanation of it: