Our Chinese New Year Week

The Chinese New Year ended on Thursday with the Lantern Festival (元宵节).  Compared to last year, my effort at this year's Chinese New Year celebration is somewhat lacklustre.  However, I console myself that we have at least managed to focus on having Chinese dishes this past week.

The recipes have been adjusted for our dietary requirements:

1. Braised sweet and sour spare ribs
2. Vegetable stir-fry
3. Stir-fry pork with noodles
4. Lemon coriander chicken
5. Soy sauce chicken
6. Slow cooker braised chinese pork

We also pulled out our copy of The Warlord's Puzzle to have a play with tangrams, a 7-piece puzzle from ancient China that Tiger had a go with nearly five years ago.

The appeal of the tangrams is its deceptive simplicity.  There are only three shapes and seven pieces.  However, as we have found, to solve the puzzles are not an easy task.  Tiger has been working through a tangrams puzzle book last week just for the fun of it.  At first, he was quite frustrated with hiimself for not being able to solve the puzzles immediately but after a few rounds, he started to be able to visualise how the different pieces can be combined together in numerous ways.  From then on, he was able to solve a few puzzles on his own.

I used the study guide that accompanies the book for activity ideas and the one that caught Tiger's interest most was that of writing a cinquain, which is a 5-line patterned poetry form that bears some resemblance to the nature poems written by ancient Chinese poets.

It appears that the patterned format of cinquains has a strong appeal to Tiger, so not only did he enthusiastically write three of them, he even went as far as editing and rewriting each one a few times before he was happy with the final result.  In the process of editing his various drafts, Tiger happily highlighted to me that he was employing the write-in-the-margin lesson that he has learnt from Tolkien not so long ago.

We had time to have another poetry tea with a Chinese snack (sesame cookies) in the week, so I taught Tiger to recite another Tang poem about spring: "Early Spring" (早春) by Han Yu (韩俞)

This poem describes the beautiful scene of a street in Chang'an (长安), the capital city during the Tang dynasty, in the early spring drizzle.  After having the meaning of the poem explained to him, Tiger was attracted to its sound and rhythm so he learnt the poem easily and quickily, and he even sang the poem alongside the clip above!  Poetry, regardless of the language it is written in, portrays a sense of linguistic beauty and mastery to its reader/listener.  I am very glad to see Tiger showing much joy and pride in reciting and translating classical Chinese poetry very well.  After all, having an intimate relationship with classical Chinese poetry is part of identifying with the soul of the Chinese culture.

This post is linked up to:

1. Creaive Kids Cultural Blog Hop #24 
2. Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/3/15
3. Finishing Strong #45 
4. History & Geography Meme #156
5. My Week in Review #27
6. Collage Friday: Refresh and Have Faith
7. Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with winter and spring in the same week

When You Give a Boy a Tin Geometry Set...

The other day I bought a geometry set for less than £3 at a stationary sale, and left it on the table.  Guess what happened?  Tiger saw it and became really excited when he realised that it belongs to him.

The following was what I saw:

What was he doing?  Drawing circles, apparently.

Tiger became more adventurous in the following days, still pouring over his tools:

His designs also got bolder as a result.

All this while, Tiger didn't ask me anything so I just let him get on with it.  It was only when he showed me his work that I realised that he was teaching himself the measurement of angles in relation to a circle.  I have mentioned angles in passing so it isn't totally unknown to him, but I like how he has shaded the different parts of the circles to highlight their corresponding angles (90 degrees, 180 degrees, 360 degrees).

Tiger was tickled when we walked past a sculpture of Issac Newton and saw him doing exactly the same thing:

This post is linked up to:
1) Look What We Did!
2) Homeschool Mother's Journal: April 26, 2013
3) Hobbies and Handicrafts - April 26
4) Collage Friday - Reading, Selling , and Recommending Books
5) Homeschool Review
6) Weekly Wrap-Up: The One Where We're Counting Down the Weeks
7) Math Monday Blog Hop #97
8) Hip Homeschool Hop - 4/30/13

Map coordinates

After learning about map scale, the next logical thing to learn is to read map coordinates.  Tiger read the following book for introduction to the topic:

As an introductory exericse, Tiger worked through a page to identify the points on a grid map with numbers on the x-axis and alphabets on the y-axis.  This was very straightforward because Tiger is already familiar with reading maps with such coordinate points.

Next, I introduced Tiger to another way to represent coordinate points -- using numbers in both the x and y axes.  This was slightly confusing because now Tiger had to figure out which axis was represented by the respective numbers.

For this exercise, I had Tiger draw out the X-axis and Y-axis, then he was to list the coordinates of the points that I put on the grid.

This was followed by applying our understanding of coordinates to drawing, first by linking various pre-set coordinates into straight lines and forming a shape on paper.

Next Tiger got to apply what he had learnt so far onto graph papers.  He was to identify various points on the graph paper based on a set of coordinates that I verbally read out to him.

These form the smaller shape on the paper.  Once the original, smaller shape was drawn, I gave him a multiple which he was to use to draw the bigger shape.

Here is another application of scaling up:

The next application was slightly more complicated than the ones before.  Here, Tiger had to:
1) plot the points on the paper;
2) reflect the figure on the y-axis;
3) learn that the equation for a straight line between two given points and which goes through the point (0,0) is y = -x.
4) apply his knowledge of rotational symmetry to plot the points of the final figure which was symmetrical to the original figure on the line y = -x.

Tiger played the following games to conclude his study of the coordinates:

1. Archery
2. Lost
3. Cops and Robbers

The lessons come from the following books:

This post is linked up to:
1) Look What We Did!
2) History and Geography Meme #69
5) Homeschool Mother's Journal: April 12, 2013
6) Hobbies and Handicrafts - April 12
7) Collage Friday - Part Time Unschoolers?
8) Homeschool Review
9) Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the 2:1 Conference 2013
10) Math Monday Blog Hop #95
11) Hip Homeschool Hop - 4/16/13

Translation, Reflection, and Rotation

As a follow up to learning about symmetry, we looked at a very similar and much related concept of translation, reflection, and rotation.  Afterall, there are three basic types of symmetry: horizontal, vertical, and rotational.

The concept is easily shown by taking a half-photo of anything.  In our case, I have Tiger trace out three copies of the half-photo of a lion.

Then place the traced images next to the original half-photos to show the three concepts.  We also did a short quiz to make sure Tiger has understood the concept.

We played a simple game of writing in different ways using a mirror, testing out the concepts we just learnt.

The final application of the concept was more complicated, as Tiger was tasked to apply all that he has learnt to copy the original design from one quadrant to three other quadrants.  That took a bit more time.

The ideas for the lessons come from the following books:

After the book lessons, Tiger hopped onto the computer and tried his hands at the following games:

1. Putting Two and Two Together
2. Nine-pin Triangles
3. Transformation Tease 

This post is linked up to:
1) Hearts for Home Blog Hop #6
2) Homeschool Mother's Journal: March 1, 2013
3) Hobbies and Handicrafts - March 1
4) Collage Friday - Sharks, Titanic, and Handel
5) TGIF Linky Party #65
6) It's a Wrap
7) Creative Learning Link Up #4
8) Weekly Wrap-Up: The Strangely Bittersweet One
9) Share it Saturday - Dr. Seuss Features
10) The Sunday Showcase - 3/2/13
11) Math Monday Blog Hop #89
12) Hip Homeschool Hop - 3/5/13
13) Look What We Did!

It is featured on Look What We Did! 10 Great Resources: Math, Science, History, and Art.

Snowflake maths

Just for the records, we have had non-stop snowing over the weekend, so it looks like we are not going anywhere far for a while.

With the examination of the properties of snowflakes from our previous science lesson on snowflakes, we followed naturally onto the mathematical aspects of this interesting phenomenom: symmetry.

We have previously touched upon the idea of symmetry so we did a quick revision with a ruler and the snow crystal prints to determine the number and types of symmetrical lines we could find in each snowflake print.

Using a protractor, we explored a little about the 60-degree angle that were very prominent in the snowflakes we examined.

Once Tiger grasped the basic understanding of the protractor and angles, he used it to mark the location of the lines of symmetry in a circle before cutting it into a hexogonal snowflake.

Next, we learned about three types of symmetries: vertical, horizontal, and rotational.

There was a lot of cutting involved in this series of lessons, as we learned about different ways to fold and cut our papers to achieve design we wanted.

One way to think of the line of symmetry is to regard it as the line where a mirror would be placed. With that in mind, we used a mirror to prove that the reflection in the mirror was the same as the symmetrical pattern we made.

Still working along the concept of the mirror-image/reflected image, Tiger did more excises which comprised of:
1) cutting out letters that can be formed from mirror images (capital letters A, C, E, H)

2) drawing a symmetrical figure

3) constructing symmetrical figures using T-square and different-angled triangles, then colour them in.

The ideas for this lesson come from these books:

Besides the hands-on activities, we also watched a clip about the application of symmetry:

This post is linked up to:
1) Look What We Did: January Link-Up
2) All Year Round Blog Carnival: Winter
3) Share it Saturday
4) The Sunday Showcase 1/19/13
5) Math Monday Blog Hop #83
6) Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/22/13
7) Hearts for Home Blog Hop
8) Weekly Wrap-Up: The One with the Renewed Motivation
9) Homeschool Mother's Journal: January 25, 2013
10) Collage Friday - Feeling Like a New Person
11) It's a Wrap
12) Hobbies and Handicrafts - Jan 25
13) TGIF Linky Party #60