April Titles

The themes for this month are:

Easter: 

Fabulas: Coelinho que nao era de Pascoa, Coelinho sem orelhas, Coelinho branuinho, Dona galinha e o ovo da Pascoa
Cancoes: Coelinho da Pascoa e o coelinho da Galinha Pintadinha.


The kids did great with these and many other stories and songs in Portuguese.

Plants and the Environment:

 We are going to go through the entire book and do all of the observations and experiments. It is useful to start thinking about the world and our role in it. We will tie this to conservation and global problems, for which we also have corresponding books in Portuguese.
We will demonstrate, for instance, how the salt water turns into fresh, consumable by people water, through the process of evaporation. We will take pictures and make a lot of observations.

These two books we have already read in previous year and we just finished reading again. This year we will follow the instructions and construct the experiments and record our observations as a team, as a group. We will take photos and do a poster or a mini book, in order to remember what we have observed and what we have learned.
There are two experiments: 1) observe how the plant grows each day, what changes from day to day and 2) observe how the plant's growth is affected by missing essential components.

Ice Cream:

 We already made ice-cream for the science fair this year. I think what we will do next is go visit a real ice-cream factory. These books are good because they do outline well, in different ways, the process of making ice-cream.

These books we have already read. They were well received.

Homes, Houses, Buildings:

This is a topic which I have liked for a long time. We have been reading on and off about houses and buildings, and we are due for a more systematic review-the package the learning type of review.

So, I would like my kids to start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of city/suburban/village life; the needs and the wants that each requires. We also have a lot of materials in Portuguese to tie to this topic which makes is especially attractive to me.

The Universe, The Stars and The Planets:

Recently, my daughter has been asking about the stars and the planets and the universe. So, we are starting slow. I think that these introductions will lead us to explore constellations, the ancient myths associated with astrology and astronomy, the process of learning the truth about the cosmos and the challenges of human thought, and of course the tools the navigators used to move across the continents and the oceans. This is the beginning of a very long journey.
My son is having difficulty with the concept that one day, billions of years from now, the sun will be no more, it will become a red giant and will vanish. He cannot understand that this is no imminent concern since we will not be alive anyway.


Overall, April has been an ad-hoc kind of month. We have been mainly reading off the shelf without a set plan, per say. The kids were on spring break and I chose to allow them to enjoy the break. We spent quite a lot of time going through books we did not like and reading also many Lego first reader books. I am quite fine with reading books we don't like. It is good to create a sense of what one finds interesting in a reading material and what not; what is a well written book and what is not. Overall, I am quite satisfied with the progress this month despite the apparent chaos and easy, content-poor readings.