Elizabeth’s Blog

Oh, are we ever sad to leave Australia!  It has been amazing and wonderful!  Even though every time we open our mouths they know we are from America, at least they understand us and we understand them.  We are on the plane to China and already I can tell this is going to be a whole new adventure for us.  The Stewardesses barely understand English.  I asked for a cracker and got absolutely blank stares from two ladies holding a platter of crackers.  As Dorothy says “Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore”.  We are not in Oz (e.g., Australia) anymore either.  

Our school working is flying along.  The kids have done over 100 pages in their main math books and almost 50 pages in their other math book. 

The trick to motivating the kids, keeping them enthusiastic, and keeping their work level at high quality has been the most interesting thing for me to learn.  They are really self motivated and excited about many things.  For instance, they enjoy doing research and giving written and oral reports on animals.  If we had enough time they would do one everyday.

Gibson can spend hours reading guide books and trying to identify animals or writing a report about one of them.  He loves it.  They also like the fact that we (Ted & I) do reports as well.  Since we can’t interrupt each other during our reports Gibson wants us all to have little notebooks to take notes on other peoples reports and to write down questions for the end.  They had fun doing an Australia ABC’s list –it will make it to the blog soon.  Sterling had a blast doing fake brochures for places we have gone.  Bullo River and the Great Barrier Reef might want a few copies.  Everyday that we had a guide or had a tour of a museum or zoo I would take notes and put together quizzes for the next day.  It kept the kids on their toes listening and helped the retain more.  I am including part of a quiz from our last guide in Daintree National Park.  You might have fun seeing how well you do.

Australia was a great place to start in our quest to be able to map all the continents that we travel to.  I got blank laminated maps of Australia and every other day we would fill in 32 different water and land locations including territories, capitals, places we went, deserts (do you know that there is the Gibson Desert in Australia?) and seas.  It was a helpful way to recognize where we were going and by the end they could map all the locations freehand.  Asia is going to be a bit more challenging.

The hotel in Cairns hit the jackpot when we left because I could not bring to China all the Australia books we bought along on our trip.  Every gift shop we went in we looked for Wildlife guides, Aboriginal stories, stories set in the area, and books on specific animals.  We now have the Fieldings’ Definitive Guide to Reptiles in Australia (we could not part with that!).  Our book of Australian birds also went everywhere we went and is well marked.  We finished both the curriculum books that covered Australia and one that I found about Tasmania.  They were a fantastic complement to what we did out and about and I really liked the reading comprehension portion.  I am thrilled I will have similar books in China.

We are almost done with the Worldly Wise book.  The kids really like to do those pages; which surprises me.  There was a funny boy at Meadowbrook School who for Halloween dressed up as an old fashion prisoner with a ball and chain and labeled the ball “Worldly Wise” and put all his vocabulary words on it.  We are using those words and new words we come across for spelling words.  How many kids have Aboriginal as one of their spelling words?  I think I am going to get some other resource for spelling.  I know there is a list of the most commonly misspelled words.  I will benefit from that too. 

We finished one easy geography activities’ book and are half way through the next.  It has covered some great topics that are really pertinent to our travels including all types of mapping, latitude & longitude, hemispheres & continents, season & the earth’s orbit, day & night, & the earth’s rotation.

Art has been an area where we have not put as much focus as I would have liked.  The kids did paint our guide and Ted’s face with ochre and a native plant as a paint brush like the Aboriginals (call me a party pooper-  however, I led the way in licking a green ant’s behind).  At Uluru we saw cave painting and learned what some of the symbols meant.  We also saw some ladies sitting on the ground making Aboriginal paintings but we never got around to doing it ourselves.  It’s a bit like pointillism and takes a long time.  I wonder if the French knew about Aboriginal Art? 

When it comes to zoos, I should start with the fact that I am not a zoo fan.  They always seem boring, uninspiring and a zoo is a zoo whether it is in Boston or LA.  Well, Australia has totally changed my mind on that thought.  Every zoo or animal park we went to had lectures by the zoo keepers every ½ hour.  We would go from lecture to lecture and learn so much!  Not only would we learn about the species but also about the characteristics, history and personality of that particular animal.  It may be that U.S. zoos are too big or cash poor but just relying on signs at U.S. zoos is a shame.  I hope they expand their educational opportunities to visitors.

I have been so grateful to all our guides.  I hope they see this thank you.  The knowledge that they have at their fingertips is mind boggling.  The more they asked the kids, the more engaged the kids became – whether it came to trivia, recent research, or meaningful geology, science, history  or biology.  The information and energy they exuded was fantastic. 

To give you an example of what we do every night after a day out exploring, the following sampling from our quiz:

 

Last Australia Quiz (sample)

 

Who was the naturalist on Captain Cook’s boat?

 

What territory has the most biodiversity?

 

How many square miles is the Daintree rain forest?

 

What does Eucalyptus mean?

 

The kopok plant is a yellow flowering tree with apple like fruit.  When it opens, what is its interior used for?

 

How many Aboriginal people are there in Australia today?  A. 100,000 B. 400,000 C. 2,000,000

 

How many non-Aborigines live in Australia?  A. 1,000,000   B. 10,000,000   C. 20,000,000 or D. 2,000,000

 

4,000 years ago who came to Australia?

What did they want to trade?

What did they introduce?            

 

What is a placental mammal?

 

What marsupial lives in America?

 

Do all marsupials have pouches?  If not, list two without.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 6:43 am and is filed under Oceania. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.