Grandma's Family Homeschool has two different levels this year, one 4-year-old and one 6-year old. Our journey can be viewed at our Action Project 2022. We are at the stage of planting the seeds of what will be our year-long project, not just the six weeks of Climate Action Project because we aim to become a Climate Action School.
Our pre-schooler is into making hearts, decorating them with messages of peace and love, playing sports, and making letters and words. She started the year planting some ornamental peppers and is observing how they are growing with interest. Her contribution to our Climate Action School's logo was "Love nature". She traced the words Weather and Climate in our Climate Action Box. Then, she decorated the areas below the box with her understanding of weather, which shows improvement over last year. I added a video on how to measure weather and what professionals should be trusted on getting the weather to us. My 4-year-old stated, " the video is for Thomas". As for climate, she said she did not know what it was. She was going to ask Alexa. She viewed the video of the picture book, "Our Home" and realized, the earth is her home. She is making hearts with W for weather. She is decorating them with rainbows, clouds, animals, oceans, people, sun, rain, storms, and winds. She wants to cover her home, her class, her school, and the earth with hearts with kindness.
Our first grader defined weather and climate in the context of feelings as he was having a not so peaceful second week at his regular school. He has created a lost and found corner in his class but he is not as focused in the 4 R's as he was last year. He is interested in climbing, playing soccer, and creating a business. His science interest this year is Water. His contribution to our school logo was "Respect Nature." He has also embraced the idea of maybe planting American Elms for Global Tree Planting on Earth Day. The American Elm is the state tree of their home state and a tree that has deep roots in the history of my adoptive state of Oklahoma. It is a symbol of resilience at our Oklahoma National Memorial and Museum. The Survivor Tree at the Memorial Park is an American Elm. I wrote to the Museum educator coordinator and the park ranger responsible for the seedlings of the survivor tree. I await their reply to see if we can plant three seedlings of the Survivor Tree in Mass. I also contacted the librarian at his school, who also was his kindergarten teacher. The school librarian connected me to local library resources on environmental sustainability.
For the communal project, my grandson has traced the letters for climate change/global warming and viewed part of a video on climate change. He made a flower arrangement for his dinning room table with the colors of the season.
We will do weather tools and then we will focus on climate, global warming, climate change and causes in depth, but the preliminary answers from the 4-year-old to these words are I do not know. The 6-year-old has a good understanding of climate and global warming, but when it comes to causes of climate change, he is going to seasonal changes.
Through "What's Up", I connected to a teacher in Croatia who is teaching 4-7-year-olds. She shared her lesson plan and suggestions to keep my four-year old engaged. I was happy to hear that she also follows her students' interests. She also almost eliminated my fear to start a YouTube channel. As of October 11th, her class had not started Week 1.