It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

OPEN SESAME: It's no ordinary Monday around MPA. Quite the opposite, in fact. Today, marks the full blown Opening Day of the 2010 Major League Baseball season. (Truth be told, the very first game of 2010 was last night, Yanks v. Red Sox, which we watched during Easter dinner, of course.)

So today, baseball factored largely into our life lesson plan! Fortunately, the folks at BrainPop took note of today's extra-special-ness and their free featured movie of the week is about baseball.

We watched the entertaining video that covers some of the history and rules of the game. I had the kids take the online quiz one at a time so neither one of them (namely, Annabelle) had the chance to dominate that discussion. They both scored a 90 percent. Then it was onto the written work, where they had to fill out a 'map' of the players' positions, complete a baseball by the numbers activity (1 pitcher at a time, 2 teams, 3 strikes your out, 4 balls for a walk - that kind of thing). And lastly, they had to define in their own words several baseball terms - everything from "run" as a noun to the infield fly rule. (Just kidding on that last part. We'll save that for second grade.)

Naturally, we can't just TALK about baseball. Even though the sky was threatening and it was around 50 degrees and windy, we headed to Bayview Park's baseball diamond for some live action.

I must say, both of their batting skills have picked up since last season. Just look at Annabelle keeping her eye on the ball!

And CJ took some good cuts at the ball, too. We're going to have to work on leveling out his swing, but that's nothing some quality time with a batting tee can't solve.

And then there's the matter of base running. While their written work demonstrates that they understand you run from home to first to second to third to home, in the heat of the moment, things can get a little crazy. Case in point, CJ was up to bat and Bee was standing on first. CJ hit the ball and Bee took off for second. Seeing his sister closing in on second, baseball rules went out the window. All CJ could think about was beating her to that base so he made a beeline from the batter's box straight to second. Oops. ...

And we're going to have to work on the cardinal rule of running home: Make sure you touch the plate!

There's more where this came from on my YouTube channel.
UP & AWAY: This morning while we slept, eyes were on the skies in Florida where Space Shuttle Discovery launched on schedule without a hitch. We track all of the launches, but have been keeping an especially close eye on this one as if it were delayed, I figure the odds are it could affect the next launch - the one in May, which we're flying to Florida in hopes of seeing!
Today's launch has a local tie - a former high school science teacher from our old stomping grounds - Clark County, WA - was on board. How cool is that?!

RESOURCEFUL: This weekend I found about The Idea Book for Educators, a biannual teacher's magazine created by the Education Department at A&E Television Networks. According to its promo, "The Idea Book includes Teacher's Guides for programs featured in Classroom and a printed version of the A&E Classroom Calendar, which features air dates, program descriptions, and copyright information." Sounds good, right? But the news gets better. The book is free! Get your copy here.

PROPER ENGLISH: For some interactive language arts education today, we turned to our friends across the pond: the BBC. We could spend all day, every day on their educational Web pages and not run out of things to do. Today, we stuck to their Magic Key themed activities. (Apparently Magic Key is a series of books with a collection of adventurous characters.) The games involved capitalization, punctuation, word order and pattern recognition. They probably spent an hour playing and learning on the site.

To go along with the online games, there's also a long list of teacher and parent resources featuring online and offline lesson plans, printable worksheets and info about curriculum relevance. Good stuff!