Wednesday, February 9, 2011

The Phantom Tollbooth

Our FIAR group read The Phantom Tollbooth this month. It was a great book and we had a lot of fun with it yesterday.

We started with the kids assessing various quotes from the book and determining if they were wisdom or nonsense. Some great discussions took place as we looked at the quotes from various perspectives, some of which made the same quote seem like wisdom and some like nonsense.

Next, the kids acted out the literal meanings of some idioms and the rest of us guessed the idioms. It was as hilarious as I'm sure you can imagine it being to see idioms like "The dog days of summer", "Flying off the handle", "Letting the cat out of the bag", "Skating on thin ice" and "Rome wasn't built in a day" acted out.

The kids then took part in some estimation activities. They estimated how long it would take to...move a certain amount of salt, grain by grain; move 8 cups of water, drop by drop; and pick apart a Styrofoam cup with a pin.

When it was time for lunch, we had the Synonym buns I had made.



After lunch, they did more math problems like figuring out the average number of children per family for our group, some distance problems using the distances between our homes, and counting the hairs on their head.

They distributed their Valentines to each other and played a game of Balderdash before sharing the homonym jokes and riddles they had found or written themselves as homework.

It was the best kind of day-one filled with laughter and learning.
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