Some Math Videos

Rafi and Moishy love watching these youtube math videos, and even sing these songs when they're not watching them.
Shows how music makes knowledge really seep into the brain.

I often hear little Moishy (3) saying in a squeaky voice "One pwus one is free... No no no, one pwus one is one... no no no, you're both wrong, one plus one is two!"
It taught them so well that my 3 year old Moishy can tell you what 1+1 is, 2+2, 3+3, 4+4, and 5+5. Amazing, no?

These are another two videos they like, about counting to a hundred.

This one is more of a song, with a nice tune.

This next one is a bit more of a rap.

Parshas Noach- Biology, Hilchos Kashrus, Writing, Drawing, Arithmetic, Geometry, Earth Science- All in One

For parshas Noach, I asked Rafi (5) and Moishy (3) if they wanted to hear and act out a parsha story. They were very eager to do so.
First, we sorted through the toys and took out all the blocks and animals and brought them to the table.

So I started telling them the story about Noach and the Teiva, and told them they were going to both be Noach. I told them about the state of the world during Noach's time, and that the world was so bad that Hashem wanted to destroy the world and start again.

I told them that as Noach, they should build a boat that is a big rectangle, out of the blocks, because Hashem was going to destroy the world besides for what was on the boat. Through trial and error, they figured out how to use the various shaped blocks to build a wall a few blocks high.

Then they filled it with the animals- two of the not kosher and 7 of the kosher animals. I explained to them what makes an animal kosher- chewing their cud and having split hooves, and explained a little about the anatomy of ruminants. We went through the animals and found which ones had split hooves and chewed their cud, and then tried to find 7 of those to put in the teiva.
Well, we don't have 7 of any toy animals, so we did a little subtraction- subtracting however many animals we had from 7, to see how many more we needed. We used paper to draw rough pictures of the different animals to complete how many animals were needed, labeled them so we'd know which was which, cut it out, and put it into the teiva. For the animals that weren't kosher, we put in only 2, and the rest of the animals of that type, we put "in the garbage" (a toy one), because those animals wouldn't survive the flood.

I told them about what the flood was like, but to give them a better idea of what I meant by a flood, I showed them a youtube video of a river overflowing and flooding a parking lot, washing away a whole bunch of cars, and the kids were awestruck.
I told them that that flood was nothing big. I showed them, then, a few videos of the tsunamis in Japan and South Asia, and they were amazed at the sheer magnitude of the thing.

We then learned about how tsunamis started via earthquakes, learned about earthquakes being started by plates of the Earth's crust shifting and banging into each other, which then transitioned into learning about volcanos, etc...

I put on two songs about Noach- a different version of this same song (can't find it now)-
The Lord Said to Noah There's Gonna Be a Floody Floody- be careful when looking for versions of this song- its a Christian song, and some of the versions are about "Y-w-h" told Noah, and yea... not kosher for frum Jews.
I also liked and played this song from 613 Torah Avenue on Parshas Noach.
http://www.chabad.org/kids/article_cdo/aid/519239/jewish/Noach.htm

Unschooling- Osmosis and Kashrus Halacha

Yesterday's homeschooling kashrus halacha (Jewish law) lesson and science lesson, combined in one, in unschooling fashion; in my opinion, how all learning should be done. The world and learning shouldn't be compartmentalized into different subjects, especially not between "secular/science" and Torah, because "science" helps our understanding of halacha.
So, what exactly was the lesson and how did it come about?
Rafi (5) asked me why the chicken skins (crackings/gribines) left from making my shmaltz (rendered chicken fat) were so salty.
To answer him, we did an experiment.
Took a DRY bowl, and ensured there was no water in it. Took a cucumber, dried it off, then sliced it up. Put it in the bowl, ensuring there was no water. Sprinkled salt liberally onto it. Set it aside for a little bit.
After half an hour, we saw how much water was in the bowl that wasn't there beforehand. Rafi wanted to know how the water got there, and where the salt went, and if the salt melted. I corrected him, and taught him about osmosis and why the water came out of the cucumbers. (At a level that he could understand at his age.)
I then said that blood isn't kosher, and asked Rafi what he thought would happen if you put salt on a chicken, and he said "the blood would come out to be with the salt". I said he was right, and said that that's why you put salt on it, so the blood would come out and the animal would be kosher. So he said "but some times there is blood in the chicken when you cook it", so I explained to him the different types of blood in regards to kosher laws, how dam hanefesh, the blood that comes out when you shecht (slaughter) the animal is 100% forbidden, and then blood that is left- dam ha'eivarim- is divided into two categories- you salt it, and the blood that comes out (dam hanifrash) is not kosher, and the blood that is left inside after salting it is kosher.

Lesson to be continued- what happens when you put sugar on cucumbers? Flour? Sesame seeds? And other osmosis related lessons. If he wants to learn that.