Strategy for Building Vocabulary

2009-09-28

Spanish lesson today. It was great! Gloria is very creative in her delivery, and flexible in response to the children's suggestions. Gloria observed, and told Austin that he makes associations all the time. This really helps him to remember vocabulary. Austin was trying to help Simon remember "tortuga," for "turtle," and he explained that it's the name of an island from Pirates of the Caribbean. I noticed that Austin can often come up with 2-3 word associations for each new vocabulary word. He's building his vocabulary fast!

We are reading "Schooled," by Gordon Korman. Austin is enjoying it, but isn't as gripped as he was, by the Olympians series.

Swimming lessons from 3:30-4:15. Austin was keen to go, and we could see he was enjoying himself, diving down at every stroke. I was thinking, he will find that swimming style to be useful when snorkelling in the Caribbean! He got a good workout.

Music lessons tonight.

Using the fall equinox to work out the other key celestial dates

Over dinner Austin and I were discussing the first day of Fall that passed this last week. I told him that in the Northern Hemisphere we call this the Fall Equinox. We then worked out that in 3 months we'd get to the first day of winter or the Winter Solstice. And 6 months from that would be the Summer Solstice (Austin was left to work out what month that would be in). I pointed out that September was 1/2 between the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice so he worked out that March would be the month for the Spring Equinox.

Reading Mania!!

Austin just spent the past 4 hours this evening reading 169 pages of The Last Olympian and he read 86 pages of Battle of the Labyrinth in 2 hours this afternoon. He's now over 1/2 way through The Last Olympian. Just like the previous 4 books in the series, it's got him totally sucked in!

Learning Curves

Yesterday Austin and I were talking about learning curves. This was after Austin tried playing my guitar for a few minutes and try one cord (D). He said, "that was hard!" This led to a comparison between learning to play the piano (easy/gentle learning curve) and the guitar (steeper/harder learning curve).

With a piano it's easy for anyone to just press the piano key and make the correct sound. Linking more than one note together is a simple matter of pressing one key then another. However, once you want to play more complicated pieces the learning curve starts to get steeper. For example, playing a melody with one hand and chords with the other.

We observed that with playing a guitar it's not simple to even get the correct sound when playing a note. You need to place your finger in the right spot (after the fret but not too far back), apply just enough pressure and strike the correct string. All this to just play one note! However, we speculated that once your body built up a "muscle memory" for the right way to play the notes (or chords) that it would become easier to learn more advanced songs.

I then described to Austin that most instruments tend to have a steep learning curve. It's usually more difficult than a piano to just make a correct note when beginning. Examples we discussed were trumpet and saxophone.

We also discussed what a "learning curve" is and why it's called a curve. I described how on the bottom of the graph we have songs that are increasing in complexity along the bottom and along the side we have the concept of "learning difficulty". We could then see that if we were graphing learning to play piano that the first few songs along the complexity axis are not that difficult to learn but as we move along to a song like _Fur Elise_ the difficulty starts to move up a lot more (FWIW this is a song that Austin has been trying to learn for about a year now but is a little "stuck" as it requires more effort on his part ... he's hitting the foothills of his learning curve!). We then did a graph of what it would take to just play a simple 3 chord song using the guitar and could see that right away, we had to place the first graph point high up on the "learning difficulty" axis. This creates a much steeper line when drawn on the graph. This is where the phrase "steep learning curve" comes from.

All the graphing was done using fingers drawing virtual graphs in the air so we don't have any paper to take pictures of.

This discussion lasted about 15 minutes. Austin played on the guitar for about 30 minutes and actually managed to make it sound fairly good w/out knowing a single chord! He just fooled around until he had it making sounds that he thought sounded good (and they did).

Science World Homelearners Labs

Today, Austin and Aidan attended a couple science labs at Science World. Austin's lab learned about the rainforest, and Aidan's about growing food.
Austin came home with a large pine cone covered in lard and bird seed, to hang in our backyard. However, Austin's thinking of not hanging it up, because it may actually turn into a death trap (ie. easy pickings for Jazz, our calico cat). Aidan came home with a few seeds in soil. He thinks he has both lettuce and carrot seeds to plant at home.

music and story telling this evening

Tonight Austin got inspired to make some music that tells a story. He sat down at the computer and using Garage Band he composed a new tune. He then selected the images for this movie (I operated iMovie for him this time).

The story behind the song according to Austin ...

So there's a couple science researchers. They go to the NASA Research Center and take their final courses on E.T life. They get promoted to Astronauts and go on a mission to Mars looking for E.T. life. When they take off there's this vibrating, rumbling sound in side their bodies. One of them says,
"am I dead?"
"No, way", says someone else, "I can still see Earth".

Then they stare in awe of the inky blackness of space.
[sc: we did a lot of google images searching to find just the right images that capture the "inky blackness of space"]
Four days from launching from Earth the Astro 1 approaches the Moon. The astronauts are pleased but yet upset because there is much more of this to come. Except there is no Moon, no Earth. Just plain black space. They enter the space between Earth, Earth's Moon and Mars.

Then, the astronauts woke with a start. The communication radio was buzzing with static. The radio was like that for one more day until they heard a weird communication sound. Kind of like understandable language. When they got closer to Mars the communication got clearer. They could then see what was trying to contact them. A huge outer space border. There was intelligent life on Mars! The astronauts were excited but at the same time scared.

When they got closer, border patrol fighters swarmed around them even though they were not in the atmosphere (the aliens created the atmosphere on Mars). When they got by they saw that the borders didn't look to friendly with their defences out. They shot out blanks just to test our awareness.

When the warning shots finally ended, a hole opened and a different color of Mars was visible. The aliens had cut a hole in the atmosphere so that we could enter without burning up. We were escorted by five patrol fighters.

As we started to land I could see how these aliens had actually formed and lived. From deep, deep underground they had evolved. There were an intelligent life form that could produce oxygen on land and could filter the air, breathing in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen (like trees on Earth).

When we landed the aliens were talking and talking and talking. They were touching us like we were some aliens ourselves. If we were them, humans would be considered aliens. Humans don't usually consider ourselves as aliens but that's what we are to other life forms in the universe.

When they got the feeling that we were not there to harm them they hosted a party. A party to celebrate that we are not alone. They then filled our ship's cargo holds full of passports to enter Mars. We gave them a couple printouts of our country's passports. At first they thought the passports were for a couple planets but then they got the picture (one planet, multiple countries).

The party was the best in all the centuries. No parties that has ever happened could beat this one. After spending a couple weeks we announced that we had our birth day by now. We celebrated like no other.

When we had to leave it was one of the saddest moments I have ever felt. They had emotions so strong that we could feel it like they were saying it.

As we left the patrol fighters had aliens on the outside of the ships waving their good-byes as we left the atmosphere and the planet mars.

I did the typing for Austin but no editing ... the story is as he told it to me. Between composing the song, selecting the images for the movie and telling the story this took about 2 hours this evening.

Movie Day

Not much :( too lethargic today.

A bit of a quiet day. Carla had a webinar that took up the whole
morning. Then, Austin and Carla had lunch together while watching part
of Ratatouille. While Austin finished watching Ratatouille, Carla
returned to her desk to finish up some work. Then, Carla and Austin
read The Battle of the Labyrinth together for about 45 minutes. Austin
continued reading independently while Carla napped for another 45
minutes (haven't been getting much sleep this week).

Then, Austin and Carla watched Elaine Morgan's TED talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/elaine_morgan_says_we_evolved_from_aquatic_apes.html
about her theory that humans have aquatic ancestors. I was interested
to discover, and I shared with Austin, that Elaine Morgan's theory is
based on ancient Greek philosophies of human evolution. This is a nice
tying in of our learning to the Olympians series, and Austin's
enduring hypotheses of the evolution of prehistoric animals.