Mt. Pancake

This is Mt. Pancake. It was our object lesson this week as we studied mountains and maps. To me it represents the heart of homeschooling.

• It involved taking something from everyday life and turning it into a teaching moment.
• It utilized the boys' great love of chocolate chip pancakes to inspire them toward learning.
• It involved cooking something. :-)

My curriculum suggested a very involved project for making contour maps that was unrealistic for my particular children to do -- one son is just very young, and one son is just very distractable. So, we built our mountain out of pancakes and then dismantled it in order to trace each layer largest to smallest, nested inside one another, to make our own contour map.

My kids are so lucky to get to learn in such creative ways. Right?
No... Let me immediately dispel any notion in your head that this was the greatest lesson ever.

• They watched me make these pancakes and they lamented how unfair it was that they couldn't eat any of them.
• They moaned that they were soooo hungry as I made a second batch of pancakes for their breakfast.
• One son said it was all wasted because the pancakes would be bad by the next day (which is when I said they could eat Mt. Pancake for breakfast)... even though we always freeze leftover pancakes and eat them later.
• So, I put Mt. Pancake off a bit in favor of completing some other parts of our day (there's more to that story) and then they were BUMMED that they couldn't do the project right then and there.

And to top it all off, as we were working on math and vocabulary and other things our baby boy climbed up on the table and ate 1/3rd of Mt. Pancake.

At least one son liked the project.