Wednesday Parkschooling: Math and History

I'm trying to make Wednesdays park day around here. Yesterday, we headed up to our secluded table near the nature center and did some math, and some reading about ancient China.

We started out making up problems about birds, and nests and eggs, since they were all around to inspire us. Of course, talk of nests and eggs led Paleo Boy off on his usual tangent, and things evolved (devolved?) into dinosaur math.

Here's an example of what we were doing:

Fifteen pairs of oviraptors each make a nest and lay 6 eggs. In three of the nests, 2 eggs get broken. In 4 of the nests, a troodon comes along and steals one egg.

How many eggs were laid?
How many eggs hatched?
After the hatching, how many oviraptors were there, all together?

He managed this without yet knowing multiplication, by figuring out that ten nests with 6 eggs is the same as 6 tens, or sixty; and the other five nests would have half as many eggs (thirty), so there were 90 eggs laid.

Then he subtracted out the losses, and remembered to double the 15 (adult pairs) and add it on to get his total number of dinos.

I was really pleased at his understanding of how to work the problem. He still doesn't have his math facts down cold, but he knows how to figure things out, and I think that is a vastly more important skill...

He did not want to stop doing math!

But eventually, we moved on to history, and read a couple of books about Ancient China. One was a fairly detailed biography of Confucius. It was fun to watch Mikro actually make connections between Confucius' teachings and Jesus' "Do unto others..", and the Declaration of Independence -- before the book pointed them out! This is really the boy's strength. He sees connections, and synthesizes things together. Watching him learn is really a treat. I wouldn't miss this homeschool journey for anything!

We had a picnic lunch, and after we were done with the academics for the day, Mikro met a new friend and played tag and dinosaurs and raced around the playground. He had a great time, and had to be pried away to go pick up Dad from the train station...

Can you believe I forgot to take a single photo?