Beach Math

Our trip to the cape this past week was full of everything: fun, love, automobile breakdowns, frustration, worry, play, sun, big sky, and of course beach rocks. I came straight to the cape after having been at a parent teacher conference for Anders and I think school was steeped into my brain. I was thinking a lot about how to enhance learning and the love of learning at home. I thought about this off and on for hours as I was driving. So, we played a lot of fun made up games that were centered around math and reading and science. One truly fun game we created was a spontaneous game called "Guess my theme." I would categorize this as a definite math game. Each of us had to find rocks and create a small group sorted by whatever theme we chose. If you look at the groups above you can see we had the grown-up and simple white rock group, the amber rock group, the freckled group, and then a few way more fun and interesting groups by Kuba and Anders....the big-small-big-small group, the mama-baby group, the bumpy-rock group, and the rocks-with-holes in them group. FUN was had by all. And it made me think that school on a beach would be a terrific way to learn. We also got to inspect a dead seagull and a small dead and decomposing whale. TERRIFIC. Serious learning going on.