Argentina Day 2

Melodie continued with her fictional reading today. She started Chucaro: Wild Pony of the Pampa. We read Doggy Slippers together. Doggy slippers was very cute. It's a collection of poems all about pets. Since we have a dog, Melodie liked those poems the most. The book is illustrated by Isol, who is from Buena Aires. We watched a short video about her from when she won an award: Isol video. The mini book report worksheet for this book was slightly different from the others.

We then talked a little about the native tribes of Argentina. Melodie looked into a little bit about the various languages at native-languages.org, which led to our math activity. I got the idea from No Time For Flash Cards. I was looking for different math activities and found a math water balloon game that looked like fun. I modified it to fit with our theme and to personalize it a bit for Melodie (and I didn't use hula hoops...I certainly don't have that many). I picked one of the native languages and used those instead of just numbers on the targets.

I chose to use the Guarani numbers. Then Melodie learned how to pronounce them using Forvo.

I had made the targets days before and I filled up and wrote on water balloons earlier that day.

We are in the middle of a drought, so to make up for using this water we didn't water our lawn for two weeks (that's why our grass is so brown in the pictures. Just wanted to mention that because Melodie is all about water conservation right now. I also had blank water balloons for Aria.

The way we played our math water balloon game was a little different. The object for Melodie was to see how many she could do in one minute. Plus, she had to say the name of the number in the Guarani language when she threw the balloon. She had a blast!

The one thing I didn't do that No Time For Flash Cards said to do was to weight down the numbers. I should have done that because some did turn over. Not a big deal, but there's a reason she says to do that! I also had made math problems with zero as an answer, but didn't make a target with zero. On the fly we made up the rule that zero meant to throw the balloon at daddy's feet (he was timing the minute on his phone, which we didn't want to get wet). This made the game all the more fun. Aria just happily threw her balloons a few inches, happy to be with her family and doing something new.