TINDERBOX

I know this is only the fourth day you’re seeing, but today was our last day of our Five in a Row practice run. Michael is still planning to write up and post yesterday’s art lesson, while I go ahead and post about today.

Our subject on the fifth day was “Applied Math.” Five in a Row doesn’t include a full math course (that would be hard to do, given the wide potential age range), but every week there are some lessons that include a practical or experiential math component linked to the story. This is probably the weakest part of the curriculum – I’m not troubled about it, though, because we have plenty of other opportunities for math.

Before we read Madeline for the last time, I had Alex collect twelve of the new Polly Pocket dolls Santa brought her to be the “twelve little girls in two straight lines” featured in the book. A thirteenth Polly Pocket stood in for Miss Clavel and ordered the girls to line up in two straight lines. Then “Miss Clavel” asked the girls how many were in each row, and one of the dolls raised her hand to give the correct answer. Next the girls were ordered to line up in three straight lines, then four, then six. After the first couple of times, I had Alex guess how many would be in each row before rearranging the dolls. She noticed that four rows of three is the same as three rows of four, but wasn’t immediately able to generalize that to know how many to expect in six rows, even though we’d done two rows of six. I thought that was interesting.

Next I had the doll designated as Madeline go to the hospital, leaving eleven little girls. We experimented with different ways of organizing them and discovered that there isn’t any way to have them line up in equal rows unless they go single file.

Our final Madeline activity was unrelated to math. Each week of Five in a Row, we’re going to have Alex do a “narration” of the story. This is a technique a lot of homeschoolers use to replace the fill-in-the-blank “comprehension” worksheets most of us probably did in elementary school. It simply consists of asking the child to tell, in their own words, as much of a story or book chapter as they can remember. Alex likes to have movies taken of her, so I promised that I would film her telling the story of Madeline.

Interestingly enough, in her practice session she recited many sections of the book word for word, including quite a few details. Then she got camera shy or something, because the recorded version is a brief summary of only a few elements – plus some things Alex made up to add in. I include it here for your pleasure.