The Duchess Bakes A Cake/ Middle Ages week 1

 

 

 

 Last week we read The Duchess Bakes a Cake by Virginia Kahl. We loved this story and had an awesome week digging into it! The story is set during the middle ages and the Duke, Duchess and their 13 daughters live in a castle complete with moat and drawbridge. The rhyming text tells a little of the life of a fine lady and how bored she became. So bored she attempted to bake a "lovely, light, luscious, delectable cake". This story not only entertained us, but also afforded many learning opportunities.
For Math: we learned about the number 13, the baker's dozen. To begin, we counted the Duchesses daughters on the cover of the story. (What clever foreshadowing!) We doubled it, tripled it, tried to evenly halve it. We tried to split a pile of 13 markers into 3 even piles, and four, and five, all to no avail. I introduced the idea of prime numbers. If we subtracted one, we were left with a true dozen.  
For Language: we learned about alliteration (lovely, light, luscious) and synonyms (pushed, pat, pummeled, punched, pinched, poked). The kids also put together a book titled Round is... We discussed how in the middle ages books were very expensive and few people learned to read and write.
Our art lesson was about complementary colors. We looked at the color wheel, discussed how these are the colors opposite each other. Which ones did Virginia Kahl use in our story? We paired our paint jars with their complement, then they spent a lovely morning painting. We also learned about drawing people in motion.
Our science for the week focused on health and a healthy diet. At first this seemed counter intuitive to me and I thought it would make no sense at all. I found out that it actually worked in really well. As we look at what our body needs to grow and be healthy, it is more obvious how unhealthy cake and sweets are.
We had heaps of fun as a family playing capture the flag and bocci ball. The kids were a bit young for both of these games, but it was fun to get outside together.
For Geography/History I circled the countries in Europe that were big players during the middle ages. Then Anastasia decided that our Duchess should be from France. We talked about the castles of Europe, and the cathedrals that were built during the time of the middle ages. We looked at some of these on-line and made stain glass windows inspired by Chartres Cathedral.
Of course we had to bake a cake this week! We attempted this lemon, blueberry coffee cake. The kids did a beautiful job measuring, however, our cake flopped a bit. Perhaps it was the substitution of yogurt for the egg. In any case, it had good flavor:)

We read some neat books about the middle ages and castles this week; here are a few of our favorites:  The Baker's Dozen, Dan Andreason
                 Castles, Gallimard Jeunesse
                 Good Night, Good Knight, Shelley Moore Thomas
                 The Bravest Knight, Mercer Mayer