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Want a glimpse inside of our day today?
It is a super hot day today so we knew we had to stay inside for most of the day. We do what we call Rainy Day Lessons. Most kids get Inclement Weather days off of school. For us, we love to take GORGEOUS days off of lessons to enjoy the day. Same idea, just the opposite.
So with the blinds drawn and the A/C cranking out a decent temperature we began looking at some examples of Bandwagoning. You know, those times when a person is told "Everyone is doing it!" or "Most people do/think/like this and so should you." Just another in our lessons of logical fallacies. We could all come up with tons of these ideas from media and from our personal lives as well. One of our favorite parts of studying logical fallacies is learning the proof, or how to confront that illogical claim. The kids discussed examples of bandwagoning and how each different example might be effectively proofed without having sarcasm enter it...harder than you might think for our family!
We all tend toward sarcasm a bit...OK, ALOT.
We interrupted our day with a few videos of musicians that we enjoy and I had the kids listen to some George Carlin because I had been telling them of his comedic genius. Turns out his genius is rather lost on this generation...
Next we started learning more about Geoffrey Chaucer and his The Canterbury Tales which leads me to share an excellent resource with you!
eBooks at Adelaide is an excellent online source for free source books and manuscripts. If you are a bibliophile like me, you might even spend hours pouring over the materials there...
We read some of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, both the original text and the translated text. It was pretty cool, though the kids might have thrown up in their mouths a little. While we were there we also read some of Plutarch's work called The Lives of Noble Greeks and Romans. We had studied Plutarch a few weeks ago, so this piece was pretty fun to read, actually...if you are a nerd. One of the neat things about the writing of Plutarch is that we contemporary readers get a great deal of our information of the time from this particular book in terms of how people addressed one another, relationships and events from the time, ritual and practice from the time, et al. The source!
And, finally, we wrote letters to our little friend who we sponsor in Kenya. Her name is Linda. She and her older brother Benson send a letter to us on Dec 11th and it took over a month to get to us...I wonder if our letters in return take that long! In addition to our letters, we are also mailing some tshirts that Benson requested, some chalk, books and other school supplies, and some kitchen utensils for Linda's mother. We have located their village on Google Earth. It's so cool how personal it is for us now that we can really know her. We pay better attention to events happening in Ethiopia.
It's later in the day now...that means SWIM TIME!
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Just curious if you sponsor a child through an organization, and, if so, could you provide a name and/or link? I've always liked the idea of doing so, but most of the individual sponsor programs seem to be through christian organizations. I don't really want to sponsor bible lessons! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI sponsor Linda through ChildFund Australian. I was told that it was a secular organization, and it mainly is, though there are some Christian components to it. The link is: http://www.childfund.org.au/node I like it because I know that 80% of my donation goes directly to Linda and her family. I can and do send other stuff. direct quote from their webpage regarding their secularity is: ChildFund Australia is an independent and non-religious international development organisation that works to reduce poverty for children in the developing world. We have been exchanging letters for about a year now. I, too, was looking for a sponsor opportunity like this one, secular, and truly helpful to individuals and communities. You might also check out their sponsorship programs for communities rather than individuals and their one-time larger-donation gifts for communities. We plan on doing at least one of these each Christmas and one other time each year.
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