Melting lines between curricula

[NittanyJen]

I love it when we can melt the dividing lines between curricula, and show the kids that such divisions are pretty artificial. I love it more when they show that concept to us, by drawing the links themselves!

 

Do you have a story about using ideas or knowledge from one "area" to illustrate, enhance, or teach in another?

 

Here is mine from today!

 

The set up: DS8 asked to do a chapter from Life of Fred: Apples, and we read about Archimedes' 'The Sand Reckoner', figuring out how many grains of sand it would take to fill up the universe (10^63, or 1 vigintillion). Last spring, our science was astronomy, and he and his older brother were just fascinated by the idea of dark matter and anti-matter. Also, DS8 has dysgraphia and a few other issues, so I will frequently try to separate his 'academic' issues from his OT issues, and allow him to dictate some of his lessons to me, so today's chemistry lesson was dictated to me, but I wrote down EXACTLY what he said with no maternal editing permitted (though the spelling is mine).

 

When he got stuck, I employed Writing With Ease style question-asking about what was on a particular page, and then asked him to summarize the page for me in one or two sentences, but he got to choose what was important and not important about the page.

 

He was summarizing Louise Spilsbury's 'Elements and Compounds', pp 4--9, as directed to do in the NOEO Chemistry 1 curriculum.

 

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DS 8: A product of NOEO Chem 1, Writing With Ease, Life of Fred: Apples (math), and a homegrown Astronomy program:

 

 

An element is something with only one type of atom. It would take a vigintillion atoms to cover my fingerprint on the table. There are Latin words to use to name elements so people with different languages can discuss them. Sometimes elements are named for their English name. Everything except antimatter is made up of elements. We don't know what anti-matter is. There are 115 elements and 25 are man-made. They use a particle accelerator to make elements, but they may only last a fraction of a second. The periodic table is arranged by chemical properties.

 

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