After last weekend's discovery of Buenos Aires' answer to Toronto's High Park, we were eager to show our new finding off to Tatsy, so after a late breakfast, we headed out to enjoy an afternoon of Spring sunshine in Palermo...
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Another new math app from Ventura... this time, it's Coordinate Geometry, designed to introduce the coordinate plane, ordered pairs, reflection, rotation, translation and so on. Although it seems a little advanced for Grade 4 math, I was interested in the flips, slides and turns aspect of things. This app seemed to be a quicker, more easily accessible alternative to Geometer's Sketchpad software, which I know I should be using, but which I just haven't gotten around to exploring yet (and don't know how to download for free, lol!) So, I gave Coordinate Geometry a go, and downloaded it onto the boys' devices. I was a little concerned that the big picture of the program would get lost on such a small screen (iPad mini), but it seem to work out quite nicely. My only complaint so far is that the figures on the plane can't be rotated; rotations, translations and transformations need to be done manually it seems, though the app does have a symmetry feature. As usual with Fred's apps, this one comes with a built in instructor's guide, great for teachers, or for parents who are home schooling their children. It also features some exploratory activities, as well as more structured lessons and quizzes for students to complete. We're just getting started with this app, but it seems it will be a good companion for our geometry unit in Math this month. Finally found some affordable (read: FREE), online PD that is available in real time, at a time when I can attend! The Ontario Teacher Federation just relaunched their website, and with it, an "OTF Connects" section, which features dozens of 1.5 hour workshops for teachers, online! The sessions take place in the evenings, from 7:30 - 9 Toronto time, which means 8:30 p.m. Buenos Aires time, which means, more or less, after the kids are in bed! I've already signed up for 21 Century Learning with iPads, Critical Literacy, Beyond the Book Report, and would have signed up for several more, had our basketball schedule allowed! Now, if I could only figure out how to actually connect to the sessions once they begin.... One month ago, we arrived in this crazy city.
We have subway passes, a favourite grocery store and ice cream place, and a plan for Hallowe'en. We've learned about exchanging money, how to make a pumpkin pie without pumpkin and which ex-pat forums have the most current and reliable information. Slowly, we're discovering how to use the bus system, and are learning a little basic Spanish. Home schooling is harder than I thought it would be, but every bit as fulfilling as I had hoped. Life is busier than I anticipated. My cooking is coming along (very slowly, I might add!) We haven't been robbed. Yet. We're starting to make friends, both local and ex-pat. Less than 8 weeks to go until our visit home to Canada before we return in the new year for the second half of our adventure. I hope to have a more solid volunteer plan in place by then, as well as a somewhat more varied Spanish vocabulary. Finding a way to get to bed before midnight with greater consistency would also be helpful. Sometimes the best lessons happen outside of the planned curriculum -- take, for example, the conversation that spontaneously arose over lunch the other day, while we were discussing where and when to exchange our next batch of USD to AR pesos... One of the reasons we chose to travel to Argentina for the year was to expose our kids to a world that was bigger than the Walmart and Costco consumerism of North America. Buenos Aires, a city where the homeless are as abundant and as visible as the wealthy, and your dollar's value depends on where and how you exchange it, is the perfect classroom for inspring a gateway conversation about consumerism and its global impacts. The dollar:pesos dilemma here is a particularly intriguing one for two 9-year-olds for whom money comes from the bank machine and has always had a set value. Suddenly, when and where we exhange our USD every two weeks matters to them. The fluxuating value of the peso, and our ability to find a trustworthy "financier" translates into potentially more helados or less soy juice in any given cycle. We recently met a neighbour who is interested in our dollars. He's willing to pay more than our regular exchanger, but less than he'd pay for dollars on the blue market. We split the difference, you see. Good for him, good for us. The boys were intrigued by this elimination of the "middle man", and wanted to know more about how it all worked. As I drew them a diagram and explained to them how those who sell pesos for dollars then take those dollars and sell them to other people looking for dollars, but sell them to those people at a higher rate, and that's how they make their money, their eyes grew wide with interest. They wanted to know if this "middle man" business was at work elsewhere in the economy... Oh yes it is, boys! And not only that, but sometimes there are many, many middle-men. That's why an item that costs only pennies to produces ends up being sold to you, the consumer, for $10 or more at the store! This of course led to more questions, including how and why something could be so cheap to produce (child labour, anyone???!!!) and why people don't just buy directly from those who manufacture an item, like, for example, the belt guy at the San Telmo market. We also talked about how sometimes big companies like Walmart and Costco have the power to buy large quantities, putting smaller companies out of business. A discussion of fair working conditions and health benefits arose (not everyone gets benefits like Mommy and Daddy, they learned. And sometimes, people are forced to work for less money than they need to pay for even the most basic things like food and shelter) -- the boys were interested to learn that the "good deal" on a pack of action figures at a store might come at a price higher than the sheer financial value. They also wanted to learn more about kids like Craig Keilburger of Free the Children, and others like him, who were making a difference in the world. (It offered a nice connection, actually, to our Scripture passage this week, 1 Timothy 4:12, this talk of empowering children and young people.) Oooooh, did we ever have a lengthy chat about social justice!!! And a student-directed one at that, oh bliss! The boys have held on to this lesson, and are making connections of their own now, in a variety of contexts. A recent example is the game "Skylander", which they had been hearing a lot about due to some cousins and several friends who play. In general, Alex and Simon don't play games with violence, even "cartoony" violence like Skylander. But after our recent conversation about the "middle man" and related topics, the boys are also beginning to notice examples of consumerism more independently, and question its value. (The Skylander giants game encourages "collecting" action figures to go with the game -- apart from the negative environmental impact of so much plastic, there is the question of how wealthy one must be to collect all the figures, not to mention the inadvertant support of child labour markets that playing along with these trends implies.) I'm excited that Alex and Simon are discovering for themselves that the world has riches to offer that far exceed the latest video game or action figure. By asking big questions, and wrestling with the implications of the often complicated answers to those questions, they are beginning to make personal choices that will positively impact their world.
It's a chance not every 9-year-old gets, and I, too, am appreciating the opportunity to look inside myself and reconsider some of the choices I make in the way I live my own life, as I consider the impact of those choices in a global world. What to do when one is unemployed and on a limited budget while traveling? One of the things I've been doing to supplement our "helado" budget is cut hair! It's not a bad gig, really... we get to see different parts of the city, and meet some interesting folks (after all, it takes a special person to respond to a Craigslist ad for an English speaking, cheap, amateur haircutter!) We travel as a pack: Tats and the boys come with me; they do their homework while I chat up the customers and cut their hair! This evening, we had a call to go see some fellows in Villa Crespo, about a 20 minute bus ride from the apartment. They were Americans working in BA for the year, and all living together in a big house. Two of them needed a haircut. After an hour and a half of flying scissors and a little bit of buzzing, one guy looked great, and the other fellow looked as good as I could get him given the extremely limited light I was working in. We pocketed our earnings, and stopped at the nearest ice cream joint, Ricolato Hilado, on Cordoba, before jumping on the bus to head home. This place has the best vanilla ice cream I've ever tasted!!! We told the owner his helados was "Muy Bueno!" (Probably grammatically incorrect, but he got the point because he smiled, and pointed to a photo of himself working at the shop some 40 years ago, and told the boys that he'd started serving helados when he was just 9 years old!) Back to the zoo we went yesterday, but this time, with Simon's pink-otter-box-clad iPad mini, so that we could document some of our sightings (the protective case throws people off the scent; it really does not look like an iPad at all). We even caught one of the baby Patagonian Hares on camera this time, though they have grown a lot since our last visit! As we had a little more time than the last time we were here, we wandered all the way to the back of the zoo, and even saw the giraffes and zebras. There we also discovered another carousel (the zoo has three, I think), and the boys had a ride for 6 pesos (about 85 cents) in total. The zoo, like the botanical gardens, offers an oasis of green in a cement-clad city, and we enjoyed spring’s blooms all around us! In addition to the photos below, we also saw an armadillo running around with an anteater -- pretty neat -- and an orangutan asking for snacks from a visitor who was shaking a box of tic tacs at him (the orangutan kept holding out one hand and motioning for the guy to give him some, and even opened his mouth as if to say, "toss some of those snacks over here into my gullet"!) After our zoo visit, we stopped to buy some fresh strawberries from a street vender outside the subway, and ravenously devoured them before heading over to El Ateneo (a gorgeous old theatre converted into an enormous bookstore) to meet Tats. After a quick snack on the “stage” of the bookstore, we picked up an art book for the kids, then headed over to the Hospital Britanico, a clinic on Calleo, to get checked out – For 270 pesos (about 30 dollars – cheaper than a vet visit in Toronto!), I got checked out by a friendly, English speaking doctor, who noted my eardrum was enflamed and my glands were swollen, and prescribed a round of antibiotics.
Reticent as I am to take antibiotics, I really had not been feeling well at all, and was not interested in my annual run-in with strep, so we stopped by a local pharmacy en route to dinner, to pick up the drugs (also considerably cheaper than in North America -- the doctor I had seen told me that he knows of people who come from Britain or the US once a year to get all their medical work done in private clinics in Argentina because it is such a cost-effective way to combine a holiday with health care!) Looking for a kid-friendly halloween event in Buenos Aires? We are planning a costumed "trick or treat" event for children up to age 12, and their families, on Thursday, October 31 at 6:30 p.m. Location to be disclosed upon RSVP (see below). Come join us! What you need:
Festive decor also welcomed (but please remember that you are responsible for taking home whatever you bring into the park, when you leave at the end of the event). Please email [email protected] to let us know if you're coming, so that we have a sense of numbers for planning purposes. (Please note "Halloween 2013" in the subject line, and let us know how many kids you have, as well as their ages.) Once we have rec'd your email, we will send out the details of the event, including location. We look forward to celebrating Hallowe'en with you. :-D The Internet is a miraculous thing. This week, it yielded a new friend! After Googling some information about BA, I came across a well-written article penned in English by a fellow educator. I looked her up, found her profile, and boldly proposed a connection on a social networking site. I was pleased to get a warm response and an invitation to friendship: Her own child is close in age to Alex and Simon, as it turns out, and they live fairly close to our neck of the woods here in Buenos Aires! So, I took her up on her invitation to meet for an afternoon walk in one of the city's many public parks, and we headed off for a few hours to Parque Tres de Febrero, the Buenos Aires version of New York's Central Park, which happens to be about 10 blocks from our apartment. While I enjoyed a chat with mom, the kids played at the playgrounds, rode some park rides and shared popcorn. Daughter, it turns out, was born here, but speaks some school English (and has been exposed to lots of English through her mom, who teaches). Although the young 'uns did not hit it off like old chums in the first five minutes, they had enough in common (namely climbing everything they could find to climb!) that there is hope for a possible friendship to develop over time. We're looking forward to to our next playdate! |
About Vera...Canadian, vegetarian, PPL, certified teacher and mother of twins, home schooling for the year, in Argentina!
Visit me online at www.verateschow.ca Archives
May 2014
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