Good morning! The wedding countdown is now at 5 weeks! Yowza! I feel like there is SOOO much to do still. Tonight is my future daughter-in-law's shower at her mother's home. Since I'm hosting one next week, I plan to do a lot of yard work, cleaning, shopping for gifts, and even food prep this weekend. Of course I've got a pile of grading to get through as well. Somehow it'll get done. Thankfully, the weather looks like it's finally breaking....less than 100 all week! Hope you can get out and enjoy it this weekend.
We're down to the last two weeks of school for this grading period. A couple of announcements before we start with our curriculum breakdown. First, I have secured a date for our first field trip! We will be going to the MIM on Thursday, Dec. 9th. More details to come next quarter, but I just wanted you to put it in your calendars if you wanted to be a chaperone. Second note is that the Classical Character Day forms are due on Monday. Please be sure to send these in with your scholars Monday morning.
Language Arts
Grammar - We are learning about compound sentences this week. This lesson will be crucial to helping the students write better sentences. After learning the distinction between some commonly misused homophones, we will be adding some of those to our spelling tests each week. We found that by doing this last year, students made much fewer homophone errors in their writing. This week, we'll focus on their, there, and they're. They will have their second quiz next Tuesday, which will cover parts of speech, diagramming, and homophones.
Poetry - "Ozymandius" recitations will take place on Friday.
Literature - We are moving right along in Pollyanna. We'll read chapters 14-21 this week. Thank you to all the volunteers for our reading groups! The children love to have that special reading time each week.
Composition - We will have our first writing assignment for the quarter this week. We are learning about St. Benedict in history, and the students will write just the introductory paragraph for an essay about him. Before we do that, we will write a couple more examples in their red spirals. Just as a reminder, those red spirals are their resource tools for all grammar lessons. We have it divided up into sections for parts of speech, poetry, diagramming, and writing.
Philosophy - Our discussion this week was about friendship and the qualities that good friends should possess.
Math - We have begun Unit 2 and the initial concept is multiplication and estimation. We are really trying to teach them that by quickly doing an estimate can help them identify errors in their math computations. We'll continue with this Mon-Wed and then we'll take a quick quiz on Thursday before moving on to division. Estimation with division is a different beast, since they have to identify the nearest multiple to the dividend.
Science - We had so much fun this week with magnets! We discovered that not only are there many things in the classroom that are magnetic, but also there's iron in sand! Monday we will talk about food that is fortified with iron. What does that mean? Then we'll move onto the relationship between magnetism and electricity.
History - We are enjoying making our foldables for the Middle Ages lapbook. This week, we'll learn about how the church split in 1055 and also about the amazing accomplishments of the monks and religious in this time period. Before moving into the whole feudal system, we'll ask the kids three questions for a checkup: 1) What are some events that led to the fall of Rome? 2) Why are these times called the Dark Ages? and 3) Describe the contributions of the monks that benefited medieval society. They have already had some written practice with the first two questions, but we will continue to review each day before Thursday's checkup.
That wraps it up! Hope you have a fantastic week!