Stone Bridge School Blog

There are some great ideas here for different lessons and projects.

http://jamedaris.weebly.com/index.html

Willow's Horse

Here's a picture of Willow's horse.



It's almost finished - will be exciting to see it finished next week. It's just awaiting the final embellishments- eyes and ears.

Busy Times Ahead

It seems that we will be busy with a few end of year Christmas acitivites. One has already happened- Willow has had her flute concert, which generally went quite well. In a couple of weeks time she will have her singing concert, followed by a choir performance at Floreat as part of the community Christmas carols.

Meanwhile Willow and Gabriel have also been attending circus skill classes on Saturdays, at the market, and both of them will be part of the Perth Christmas pageant. Apparently they go around Langley Park, down near the river. Willow has been working on the stilts and is hoping to master them this week so that she can use them in the pageant.

Willow has also started musicianship lessons, with Cottage children's choir. The musicianship lessons look really interesting. The follow the Kodaly method of teaching, and the lesson is filled with rhythmic patterning- in clapping, moving, games and singing. I'm thinking that maybe Gabriel should go next year too, when we can hopefully organise music lessons for him.

This week we've finished off Willow's last history block for the year. She's just finished a story about vikings, as well as looking at the magna carta and the crusades. Next year will be interesting, as I'm hoping to have her take over arranging most of her learning. We'll do the planning together, and then hopefully she can do most of the work independantly, that way I can focus on doing more kindy based activities with Arden. Particularly towards the end of this year, he's really needed more focused attention and more activities just for him.

Gabriel has been working on the nine parts of language again this week, with a final block on the Norse Myths.

Sinfiotli baking the Serpent Bread by Gabriel.

My picture of Sinfiotli and Sigmund.


Willow and I also worked on another Islamic pattern, as well as doing a woven star in geometry.




Next week we'll be back to physics, I haven't managed to find any magnetite here with a strong magnetic force, only a very weak piece, so we won't be able to do some of the magnetite experiments unfortunately. We can do the one where we place the magnet over a pile of crystals and the magnetite is the only crystal attracted to the magnet. At least that nicely illustrates the magnetism of the stone.

Finally here's some friendship bracelets Willow and Gabriel made this week for a friend.

This is Willow's which was designed to be a book mark.


And the one made by Gabriel.

Title-less

Due to some issues with resources (I've been having difficulty finding lodestone/magnetite)- we've stepped away from physics from a few weeks- and Willow is doing a block on medieval history. The block has been very interesting so far- we've been using Charles Kovac's book 'The Age of Discovery' for the basis of the lesson. There's been a progression through the stories of Jesus based off the progression of Rome and monks creating beautiful works telling Jesus' story.

This is Willow's painting of Jesus' birth.


And her illuminated letter.


Gabriel thought he'd have a try too.


A castle design.


This week we progressed onto Islam and Judaism, and did some Islamic patterns.


Willow also did some writing- both creative and factual- she's currently working on a story about viking times, and she also wrote a page about Albert the Great.

Gabriel has just come to the end of a block on ratios and fractions, and will be doing his final block of the year, on the Norse myths. We are planning a play for our final week, which will be fun, as we haven't done a play in quite a while.

Gabriel has also progressed nicely through his cushion and should be finishing the lion soon.


We've been a bit disappointed to find this week that The Herdsman has closed it city shop, due to lack of popularity. It seems good quality food hasn't really taken off here quite that much. Seems like it's a good decade behind Adelaide- I've been quite surprised by how progressive Adelaide's food culture is by comparison. I will have to get out to Organic on Charles more often over the summer.

Progress

Willow has stitched up her first horse toy pattern, on the whole it is fairly good, however the middle piece is slightly too wide. So the new version, of the pattern is narrower. Also we found the edging, of the fabric(for sewing up) was too narrow, so the new pattern is wider. Here's the horse starting to take shape.






We've just started reading "King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table" by Roger Lancellyn Green, which of course everyone is loving. Gabriel came up with this picture, after listening to the first chapter.


We've been progressing through Willow's physics block with great success. Robert Trostli's book is excellent, and everyone's loved the experiments. Some of the highlights would be making wine glasses sing, by using rubbing a wet finger around the rim; generating the colours red and yellow by covering a torch with many layers of thin paper; mixing paints in water- to see the way the colours interact, mixing coloured lights, and casting coloured penumbras using a white torch and a coloured torch; burning alcohol; a hot water 'volcano'; observing incense inside a glass jar; and cracking marble.

Anyway this week, we're meant to be moving onto magnetism, but so far I'm having no luck finding magnetite or a lodestone, and I still haven't got a horseshoe magnet or bar magnets. And really it would be better to do the magnetism prior to electricity, so I hope I can sort that out in the next couple of days.

Also these are Willow's and my latest forms.

Willow's picture.


My picture.


I love the way, that we both drew pentagons (using the same method) and that due to our decoration, one could think that they were totally different objects. Yet all the difference is, is that Willow's is a pentagrams and mine is a series of pentagons. Then she has coloured her stars, and I've coloured a single section of pentagon, heading internally, to create a spiral.