We had taken a road trip to Southern California the week before and spent some time talking about missions and their history. Since we followed the 101 or El Camino Real (The King's Highway) almost all the way to San Diego, we passed a majority of the 21 missions that were established by the Spanish so long ago. We toured Mission Santa Barbara on the trip home. It was beautiful. We talked about the brick work and all the labor that went into a building that survived earthquakes and the test of time. The mission has had repairs done over the years but parts of it are original.
When we got home, we spent the week exploring the missions, talking about the Ohlone Indians who are indigenous to our area and their lifestyle before the Spanish came. The Ohlone Days will be happening in a few weeks and we can get an idea of more of their customs.
I feel like we are moving through local geography a bit out of order. I had planned on starting with us, our neighborhood and spiraling outward from there, but the trip down south made the missions seem more alive so we went with it. We will be taking a couple of day trips to visit Mission Santa Cruz, Mission San Juan Bautista and Mission San Antonio. For this block and probably for this grade, I will not delve too much into the wrongness of removing lands from the indigenous people.
This week, I am back tracking a bit and we will be looking more locally at our community, who we are, the physical aspects of Santa Cruz and different history bits for the area. This area is so rich and has such diversity, I could really spend a great deal longer then the three weeks I planned.
We also spent some time working on mapping, form drawing, remembering the math skills we worked on last year, practiced reading skills which I was quite pleased to see were not forgotten. We finished reading the Seven Year Wonder Book which was very well received and worked on a little knitting. It felt like a very productive week.
How was your week?
