Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Global perspective

For the past few weeks Lucas has had homework. Most of the time, it's a fun activity for us to do together over the weekend. Once I heard him say to Kevin, "I have so much homework!" Each week focuses on a different continent. The assignment is to cut out pictures, make a collage about that continent, and make a presentation to class during circle time.

North America and South America were pretty easy with the Sunset and cooking magazines we had around the house. Here is his first assignment of North America.


You can kind of see in the bottom right corner that he wrote "Lucas". He also usually embellishes it with stamps or stickers.

We missed Asia since he was sick that week. Europe was a piece of cake. Africa proved to be challenging. We bought $10 of magazines at the bookstore to do the assignment.

I asked him what he was going to say in the presentation. He pointed to the pictures and said, "This is an African beach. These are two camels walking through the desert in Africa. This is an African lady working in the fields."

Whatever they talk about in school is sinking in on some level with Lucas. How do I know?


1) I was telling Lucas a story on the way to school yesterday, which included the "highest moutain ever, a million miles tall". He surprised me by asking, "Is it taller than Mount Fuji?". He informed me that Mt. Fuji was a beautiful mountain in Japan and his teacher Nobu showed them pictures in class.


2) On the way home from school yesterday, Lucas asked for a scary story. I made one up about witches coming to Radiator Springs and how the cars had to load up the witches on boats to get them to Antartica to break the spell.


Lucas stopped me and said, "They don't even need to get in a boat Mommy. You know that North America and South America are connected? And then, South America and Antarctica are so close that they can swim." Okay, so maybe you can't swim from one to the other, but I thought it was pretty darn close for a boy of his age. I asked him, "How close is South America to Antarctica?" Lucas said, "I don't really know, but they're very close. I guess I can explain it to you with the globe at home, okay mommy? Can you wait until then?"


3) Last night as Lucas was falling asleep he was singing a song to himself. Something like this, "North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and don't forget Australia, and don't forget Antarctica, and don't forget Chile" (his other teacher is from Chile).

It's nice to know that he's learning that the world extends beyond our confines of the East Bay.

1 comment:

RookieMom Whitney said...

My friend Emily used to teach social studies and used that song with her students. I will send her here to see if she can set you straight on the lyrics. I like the addition of "Don't forget Chile." And don't forget "Berkeley."