Author Archives: thefinnstitute

We’ve been studying, and have created a main lesson book about the Finger Lakes. This winter at a holiday event, a parent of a former student at Stone Circle School said, “ She just sang us, word for word, the … Continue reading →

Volcanoes: Shield, Fissure, Composite, Cone-shaped, Crater Volcanoes Strombolian, Vulcanian, Peleean, Plinian Eruptions Volcano zones around the earth. Famous eruptions: Mt. St. Helens, 1980, Thera destroys Akroteri, 1645BC (possible Atlantis myth), Mt.Vesuvius buries Pompeii, 79AD, Krakatoa near Java,1883, heard ¼ around the … Continue reading →

Pulley, Pendulum, Pressure, Potential Energy Pulleys – We’ve drawn diagrams of various styles of rigging, and then built them in the classroom and recorded their properties. Here are some of the setups we looked at: Fixed Pulley Movable Pulley W/2 … Continue reading →

The Human Face through History We’ve been very deliberately studying how the Human Face has been presented and perceived by the many great cultures through history. Each cultures’ artistic representation of the portrait gives a telling doorway into and through … Continue reading →

Measurement – our measurement studies in December included: Dry Measure – Using fruit, vegetables and grain we studied market measure, pints and quarts of berries, ½ pecks and pecks, bushels of apples, barrels of grain, bales of cotton and tobacco, … Continue reading →

This month we very much enjoyed the many Optics and Visual Perception Experiments we tried. Many of these we wrote up in Scientific Method, listing Materials, Procedure, Observations, Conclusions, Diagrams.  The Jumping Finger and Bouncing Ring – These experiments helped … Continue reading →

September Main Lesson   The Renaissance The Humanists, Petrarch, “a Classical Education”, Machiavelli’s  “The Prince”, the often cited and emulated book on Governing, Castiglione “The Book of the Courtier” an immensely popular book on Courtesy. Scientific Revolution:  Principle of Doubt, the … Continue reading →

 Here is a review of our work this month in the History of Mathematics: COUNTING Early tribes used a base 2 to count: 1,2,2-1,2-2,2-3, or a base 3: 1,2,3,3-1,3-2,3-3; then they advance to a number system using their fingers and … Continue reading →

In our study of geodesic domes, we studied the tetrahedron and constructed one out of card stock. The incredible strength and simplicity impressed them.  We then moved on to the octahedron, and the eventual icosahedron. In further studies we used … Continue reading →