"Sometimes I talk a lot..."

Such a funny picture!

Costumes

Classic! Captain Obvious, Prince Ants-in-the-Pants, and Princess Talks-A-Lot
Captain Obvious is probably going to repeat a question someone just asked, the dear prince is probably formulating another question in his mind, and Princess Talks-A-Lot already knows the answer.

Checking out the shaduf

The shaduf up close

My Nile River that looks more like a chicken foot

Flooding the Nile from the melted snow in Ethiopia

Those words were uttered by Princess Talks-A-Lot. I thought I would lose it laughing. She also has a habit of raising her hand before the question ends and thinks of the answer on the spot. Today she did it and she started talking and then stuck her tongue out and made a funny noise and said, "Oh. I forgot what I was going to say." HAHAHA. I laughed at her... couldn't help it. Good thing she's so easy-going. In fact, she really is a sweet child. Today one of the boys accidentally smashed into her arm with his chair when he was going somewhere and she started crying quietly. I saw her sniffling and I asked her and she told me it was an accident. She never said anything to the kid who did it and just sniffled quietly to herself. She's really the most selfless child in the class.

The kids were crazy today. The fair Duchess Whines-Too-Much was whining at every opportunity today. I was so annoyed. She complained about everything. She even started the day complaining. She complained all through language arts too. In fact, her whole group was off-task during language arts. She didn't pay attention to math and kept asking us to repeat the directions. She's very insecure about herself... she's used to getting A's on everything and she's paranoid if she thinks she just might get something wrong. Therefore, she doesn't try. They were doing rounding today and Janine has a really cool rounding chart. It has numbers on hills with multiples of 5 at the top of each hill. She illustrates it by saying that there's a gas station at the 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, etc. If you run out of gas at the 8, it's easier to roll down the hill forwards to the 10. If you run out of gas at the 3, it's easier to roll backwards to the gas station at 0. If you're at the 5, you're trying to visit your friend at 100 and it's easier to roll forward to the 10 rather than backwards because then you'd have to drive back up and waste gas. It was a cool chart. One of our slower kids was on a roll today. He really got it! He was so happy that he got it too. Cute kid.

We did the long-awaited social studies lesson today. I split the lesson over two days because I need the computer lab for the other part. The first part of the Nile River lesson only took a few minutes, so they were able to finish their costumes and dress up for a picture. For the Nile River, I dug up the volleyball court (it's sand) and made a relief map of the Nile River. I poured water from "Lake Victoria" to show how it ran all the way down (north.. rather than south as some of the kids thought would happen) to the delta. I had also made mountains in Ethiopia and Central Africa and demonstrated melting snow flooding down into the valley in Egypt. I ripped up some weeds that were growing all over the court and I stuck them all along the edge of my river to make it look more fertile. The sand was damp underneath which was perfect because it made it black and Egypt was called "Kemet" or "Black Land." We made a little irrigation ditch and flooded that too. I also made a model of a shaduf and stuck it in the sand and demonstrated how they were able to easily get the water out of the Nile into their irrigation ditches. Anyway, it was fun. I'm going to put a few pictures here but the rest can be found on Facebook. :)