Gandhi - The power of one

There are a certain amount of people in history that every child should know. Today, my children were introducted to Gandhi. Granted this movie is long 190 minutes, but it is well worth the view time. Today, I exempted the kids from all of their other homework (mind you DD had already done Social Studies and volunteered at the library and DS did his Math, Writing, and Reading - so it was only a partial repreave) and we watched Gandhi which I had taken out from the local library.




Gandi had come up this morning at Bible Study as we discussed what it meant to walk in Jesus' footprints. Maryann said that she thought Gandhi had in fact responded that in a way that although he wasn't Christian that since he tried to act in way similar to Jesus that in fact he had walked in his footsteps. Now whether Gandhi indeed said this or not did not really matter to me. What mattered was that I realized that I did not know much about his life especially as they began discussing his early work in South Africa and so I was inspired to learn.

I'm not sure that the kids will further their studies on him right now, but I will certainly try to find some of his writings to read. Perhaps I can even find a book that I can apply to the 2009 reading challenge.

This also led me to another question: What people in history do you think all children should know at least a little about?

A Study Guide to Survivor - The Beginning Season 17: Episode 1

Our homeschooling will take an interesting turn starting today: Survivor, the show has started. Unfortunately, we were all busy tonight and did not see the whole show, but even in the few minutes we had the show on, a fun fact came up. DS said, “Oh, I’m glad I’m not there right now.” They were showing one of the contestants sitting on the edge of the water with a hippo nearby. DS knows that interestingly hippos are very dangerous and have been recorded as killing humans. He also knows from one our visits at a zoo that Hippos projectile poop and spread it even farther by flipping their tail (there are various YouTube videos to show this phenomena if you are interested – you can’t quite get the full effect because you miss the beautiful scent, but I’m sure you can imagine.).

This will be just the beginning of our exploration. We will have to find Gabon in Africa and research the culture, habitat, animals, etc. Maybe we’ll have to create a little study guide for the season. I’m sure DD would volunteer for that job.

You could always start with some geography games placing African nations in there right locations on Sheppard Software.
You could listen to music from Gabon.
You can color in the Gabon flag.
Perhaps you could even have the kids pretend that you are going to travel to Gabon and ask them to find out about currency, language, weather, etc.

I did not get an opportunity to really see the whole episode, so when I do perhaps I can add some more ideas. In the meantime, you may want to check out their website.

Some people may not feel that Survivor is appropriate for young children. My DD has watched it since the first episode and yes there were a few uncomfortable issues, but we have always watched it as a family and discussed things that we agreed with in the show and things that we didn’t. We have been able to have many interesting ethical discussions and a few conversations about the difference between real life and cyber life. Fortunately, the advent of On Demand and the internet has helped alleviate some of DD’s stress over choosing tv over real life. Now I try to use her tv addiction to encourage learning. II also find it to be a great behavioral persuader. There is nothing that gets DD to rethink her behavior faster than the threat of loosing tv privledges on the night of Survivor.

If your child is like DD, let’s ban together and come up with some activities that can expand their learning while they follow their interests.

Mythbusters Science

One of our favorite shows is Mythbusters. It is a great combination of Science and the explosions. A recent episode centered around a very simple idea that had been sent to them about the force needed to seperate two phone books that had their pages overlapping. Here is the viewers video that was sent to Mythbusters to spark the idea . . .



This is a great project to test your kids with because it just seems impossible. It can be a great jump off for conversations about force and friction. While I don't recommend trying to rip it apart with cars, you could make for a very interesting tug of war.

What have your favorite Mythbusters episodes been? Have you done any great experiments after the fact with your kids?