Thinking Like Leonardo - Exploring da Vinci helicopters

One of the ways we bring history to life for young gifted students who have the interest and capability to understand big ideas, but often have trouble understanding historical eras and timelines in relationship to their own relatively short lifespans, is to focus on a single -- or singular -- person: in this case, Leonardo da Vinci. We studied Leonardo as a model for what it means to be a Renaissance thinker as well as a representative of the Renaissance itself. Through his eyes, we explored inventions, painting, sculpture, math, science, anatomy...and discovered the power of "thinking like Leonardo."

Playing with some models of his inventions

Exploring his notebooks online

Trying out his "helicopter" design with paper seed models

Thinking like Leonardo is fun!

The Little Prince

In a year with the overarching concept "Quest," we could not pass up the opportunity to do a novel study on The Little Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery. We talked about many themes in this book, but the focus was on the idea of exploration and enlightenment. As one reviewer put it:

"As the critic James Higgins points out, each of the novel’s main characters hungers both for adventure (exploration of the outside world) and for introspection (exploration within himself). It is through his encounter with the lost prince in the lonely, isolated desert that the friendless narrator achieves a newfound understanding of the world. But in his story of the little prince’s travels, Saint-Exupéry shows that spiritual growth must also involve active exploration. The narrator and the prince may be stranded in the desert, but they are both explorers who make a point of traveling the world around them. Through a combination of exploring the world and exploring their own feelings, the narrator and the little prince come to understand more clearly their own natures and their places in the world."

We studied the characters, compared and contrasted their character traits, and thought about the personalities that might go with different flower types after reading about the prince's precocious rose. After a lot of thinking and writing about what we read, we got to see the play performed at the Seattle Children's Theater. What a wonderful book!

Cars through the ages - a field trip to the LeMay

While studying inventions, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, we thought a lot about what life was like in the past compared to how we live today, and learned the stories behind many modern conveniences. 

One of the things we learned about the Middle Ages was that people in the peasant class were tied by the feudal system to the land where they worked, and many never traveled far outside of their village in their lifetimes. Only wealthy nobles and knights had horses, so most people were restricted to travel only as far as they could walk. 

What a far cry from today in America, when many families own not one, but often two (or more) cars! It was interesting to learn and think about how inventions like the printing press and the steam engine have changed the way people live ... and what better place to see the evolution of things like automobiles than Tacoma's very own LeMay Car Museum?

We were particularly interested to see the Model T Ford - which we learned was not actually the first car, but the first car that was affordable enough to make owning one possible for middle-class families, thanks to assembly-line construction. We also tried our hand at creating our own cars, testing them for aerodynamic efficiency, improving them and testing again!

Here's that famous Model T! It was like greeting an old friend when we got to see it in real life!

Dr. Seuss machines

We read a lot of Dr. Seuss in preparation for Read Across America Day and our annual trivia contest. Since we were studying inventions at that time, we were interested in the Cat in the Hat's room cleaning machine, and decided to come up with few Dr. suss-inspired machines of our own:

Read- on!

One of our favorite things to do is to share a good book with a friend, and that's exactly what we did at our Dr. Seuss day read-in this year!

Read on!