A Fable

The World in the Center of the Universe

Three million years ago, there was a talking animal world in the center of the universe. There were zebras, spotted chameleons, tropical birds, owls and tigers. Long ago, one of each animal ran into a magic circle and became one being. This new animal was called the creator. His black and white zebra horns Stood on his head like a king’s crown and his zebra eyes were gentle and wise. He had a rainbow face with pretty feathers and colorful scales. Two chameleons’ tails made his nose. His mustache was the soft plumage of an owl which partially covered his fanged tiger mouth. The creator and all the animals lived together in love and harmony.

The world in the center of the universe had a sun. The sun shone on the world and gave it warmth. It had so much fun watching the animals play. The sun was happy to be a part of the animal world. Then one day, the sun saw another sun off in the distance. She was beautiful and golden and he fell in love. The sun thought that to win her heart he must have more love to give, so he started absorbing the love from his world. He saw the zebra children playing and he took their love. Then he took the love from the happy tiger couples. Next, he took the love from the chameleons. Finally, he saw the birds and owls and he took their love of flying. After he was done, the sun left with the golden sun leaving his animal world in darkness and despair.

Without the sun and all the love, the world was pitch black and icy cold. The animals started fighting with each other. They yelled and clawed. The birds were so sad, they didn’t fly. Chameleons cried in the trees. The tigers layed sadly in the grass. The zebras walked with their heads down. Mom and dad animals didn’t care about their baby animals. Some others just criedbecause all the love was gone. They were all upset except for one, the animal with love still in his heart, the creator.

The creator went to visit the animal sun. He begged with his whole heart for the sun to give the love back. The sun said that he wanted the love to give to the golden sun, but the golden sun heard the entire conversation. She told the animal world sun that she would not stay with him unless he returned the love to the animals. She told him that she loved him even more when he was just being himself. Since the animal sun cared about her so much, he used all his strength to return the love. The flowers bloomed and the black grass turned green. Fighting turned to playing. A colorful rainbow filled the sky and the birds sang and soared. The chameleons didn’t cry anymore. Tigers ran and wrestled playfully again. Zebras walked with their heads high. It was the happiest day ever. The animal sun learned his lesson. You can’t steal love. It has to come from your heart. And they all lived happily ever after.

THE END

Art

Wes Art

First Art Class

Our Celtic Irish Tree

Westen's Book Report

Last quarter Westen's reading book was The Janitor's Boy by Andrew Cements. We began this quarter by writing a book report. I gave Wes a rubric in the form of a submarine sandwich to keep it fun, but make no mistake, this was a serious report which included setting, character descriptions, summary, climax, vocabulary words and art work. He made first drafts, went through the process of editing and then carefully wrote final drafts onto his sandwich pieces. He also presented his finished report orally which he enjoyed doing because he was very proud of his sub!

Pictures From Our Study of the Middle Ages

This is Westen's representation of the four alls: the Peasants who worked for all, the knights who fought for all, the king and queen who ruled all, and the priests who prayed for all and who were thought to be all knowing.


We also made our own Medieval Feast. The bread was a special recipe Wes worked on with his dad. It's called Rose Petal Bread. Notice the hollow our bread in the picture. That is what we used for our plates. The main course sits on a piece of flat bread or "mess". We had salt as a seasoning, but no pepper. We drank from goblets and used our fingers! If the bread looks good, Here's the recipe:

Rose Petal Bread

You will need:
1 package of active dry yeast
1.5 cups lukewarm rose water
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons salt
3-4 cups flour
Cornmeal and butter
Food Dye
1 egg white

To begin, make the rose water by simmering rose petals in a small amount of water. Remove the petals.

In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in the rose water. Stir sugar, salt and some flour into the yeast. With clean hands, knead the dough. Add more and more flour until it won't take anymore.

Push the dough around on a floured board. When the dough becomes smooth and elastic, cover the bowl with a clean cloth and go play for an hour!

When you return, the dough will be bigger. Punch down the dough, and divide in half. (we made ours into one larger loaf) Form each half into a circle, oval, heart or long loaf. Place the loaves on separate buttered baking sheets that are sprinkled with cornmeal. (We just placed ours on a silicone baking mat on top of a cookie sheet.)

Next comes the art part. Mix a food color with a little bit of egg white to make "paint." Paint vines, leaves, flowers or any other art on the top of the loaves. (my son chose blue food coloring. We painted the whole top of the loaf and then decorated with rosemary and chives.)

Bake in a preheated oven for 40 minutes at 400ºF. Delicious!

Patayan Inspired Intaglio ~ An Art Project

As Wes and I have been working our way through the different ancient people that are part of the 4th grade curriculum here, we have been incorporating art projects. This week we have learned about the Patayan people. Among the things we learned is that the Patayan left behind amazing intaglios. Here's a great article we found: America’s Nazca lines We decided to make intaglios of our own. The project was a lot of fun and very easy to do. So for all of you art teachers or arty moms, we'd like to share:

This is Westen's Intaglio. He wanted to see how many different symbols he could make. We gathered inspiration from a little book we have called Easy Field Guide To Rock Art Symbols of the Southwest.

I couldn't resist getting in on the fun. I made a big person and a little person who seem to be celebrating the sun and their thriving corn crop as the lizards dance by.

This was a very easy project to put together. We just cut out pieces of cardboard from a box. We used our hands to coat one side of the cardboard generously with regular white craft glue like Elmer's. Then we covered the cardboard with black craft sand that you can buy in most craft stores. Then we just let it dry in the sun. To create our intaglios which actually means "incised designs", we used the wood end of a small paint brush. The brush end came in handy to remove loose sand or we just blew on it. We had a really good time with this one so we wanted to share!

Pueblo ~ Paper Model Project

This week we have been talking about the Sinagua of the Sunset Crater region. It was time to build a pueblo representing their later structures rather than their earlier pit houses.

You can find this paper model and many more at my favorite publishing house: Dover Publications. Whenever you walk into a museum shop, you can bet a large percent of the literature and activity books have been published by Dover. Their prices are great. You can buy paperback books in so many genres for discount prices. It's a super resource for anyone and an awesome educational site. I'll add it to my favorites list for your convenience.

Oh, one more thing. You can get on an email list for free samples. Weekly you'll receive clip art, coloring pages, shorts stories and more!

Westen's Aztec Temple ~ Schedule Updates

We just finished studying the Aztecs. Wes chose a golden temple for his clay dwelling project.

Well, we are three weeks away from the end of our first quarter. It's kind of wild to think of most of the school children being on their 3rd day of the year. I have to say, I love this year round schedule our school district follows. Those long breaks between quarters go a long way to keep your brain fresh and to fend off scholastic burn out!

In the way of an update:

Math - We just completed a section on division finishing up with long division with double digit divisors and remainders; the works. I think we are both glad to be moving on. LOL! Long division is not one of Wes's favorite things. Now we are entering a unit on averaging so we haven't completely escaped division. Next we will be headed for geometry. Yea!

History - We are working our way through the list of cultures that the fourth graders are slated to study. We just started with the Sinagua of Northern AZ and still have the Patayan, Salado, Inca, and Maya to go. Needless to say, we only have enough time to get a small sense of the life these people led. We are keeping a time line as we go in addition to our clay dwellings. We are also making a poster page of each group on which we write all the interesting tidbits we can find. We will also take at least one more field trip to the Basha Museum of Native American Arts (I'm not sure if that is the actual name). At some point this year I would also like to go to the Heard Museum.

Vocabulary - We are currently studying prefixes. Wes is a happy camper this week because the prefixes are uni-, bi-, and tri- which are already familiar to him. Who doesn't like an easy week?

Science - We've been studying the environment and the earth's processes. Tomorrow we'll look at floods. We have also been saving recyclables for art projects.

Religion - Currently studying Judaism

Reading and Language Arts - Just finished up our section n fables although we will still read a few more tales of Native American Folklore. This week we made cards for the Grandparents as this Sunday is Grandparents Day. I don't even know if the Grandparents know about Grandparents Day, but they are about to find out! Fluency is still going really well. It's become a nice part of the morning routine and practically runs itself. We started a new work of fiction this week and are enjoying the story so far. We need to get a little more into the book before we can really start to discuss some of the literary elements. Of the literary elements that 4th graders are meant to learn, we've covered over half already. Now it's just a matter of reinforcing the concepts in the work we do.

Westen's Great House Sculpture

Westen's version of the Great House at the Casa Grande Ruins.

Sculpture Photographs ~ Pit House & Cliff Dwelling

I like posting pictures here at Indie Teach as a way to preserve our work and time together. Over the past two weeks we have begun our section on Native American Cultures. So far we have talked about the Mogollon People and the Anasazi. Those both of these peoples lived in different sorts of dwellings throughout the span of their time. We have chosen one representation to recreate in sculptural form.

Pit House



Cliff Dwelling

We created the Pit House while discussing the Mogollon People. It was a great way to review what we learned. "What kind of food might be in their house?" "Tools?" You get the idea. The Cliff Dwelling served the same purpose in our education about the Anasazi. We have quite a few more cultures on our list. For each one we will erect a home and in the end, they will come together to be a village of Native American Peoples and a visual reminder of all that we have learned.

By the way, in the interest of sharing, here is a link to a wonderful YouTube video of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park.

Week 3 (2009/2010)

Here are the first pictures of the new school year! In social studies we have been studying prehistoric peoples. For each group, Wes has made a stick figure and written a paragraph. Today Wes is finishing up his last paragraph and we decided to mark the occasion with a couple pictures. After I took this picture of Wes with his prehistoric peoples, he noticed that I had two of them mixed up. "Mom, the Neanderthals came before the Homo Sapiens Sapiens." I had to fix my order and take another picture. I guess he learned his lessons!


From left to right: Hominid, Homo Habalis, Homo Erectus, Neanderthal, Homo Sapien Sapien, Cromagnon, Hunter Gatherer, and Civiliation

Week 6 ( Feb. 10-13 )

Another short week this week. We seem to be having several of those in a row, but sometimes things just can't be helped. Wes and I are making the most of our time.

This week we are starting an exciting new section in our science studies. We are studying plant anatomy and how plants grow. We've read three books. One book, What's Alive? by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld, talked about what determines whether something is alive or not alive. Afterwards Wes spent time outside identifying 6 living and 6 non-living things. He drew pictures of them on individual cards and colored and labeled them. Then he turned this collection into a poster with one half representing the Alive and the other the Not Alive things.


Going backwards, we started the entire section by reading Oh Say Can You Seed which is part of The Cat in the Hat's Learning Library collection. It's actually full of information as well as beloved characters. Finally, today Wes read A Tree Is a Plant by Clyde Robert Bulla. This goes into detail about the life cycle of an apple tree. We also started our big Bean Sprout Project.


We have three different kinds of beans started, mung, broccoli and lentil. Wes picked the beans. We tried to pick three that looked different as seeds. Wes is keeping logs of all our our scientific data and as the week goes on, we will be learning more about these kinds of seeds in particular as well as charting and comparing their individual progress.

We are in a math transition right now. We will be starting the study of weights and measures.

I'm going to try to push on through to the end of the cursive alphabet this week and then we'll move on to writing words.

In language arts, we are beginning to study verbs. I plan to spend a fair amount of time with this part of speech and really grow Westen's understanding of verb forms.

Our Piano lesson went well today. We are learning how to approach the process better. I'm a little rusty as a music teacher.