Cycle 1 Week 3

So grateful for the opportunity to spend time with your young ladies each week.  It is so great to watch their personalities be  revealed through each activity and to watch them as they meet each challenge. 

Geography

As always, we started our day with this topic.  The girls worked on their blob drawings.  They are getting fast at this.  Some of them did it twice.  We then sang a song Renee Wimberly taught us naming all the continents to the tune of He's got the World in His Hands.  I am going to list this one in a separate post later.  After that we worked on locating each place on the maps.  This was a challenge since this map has changed form all preous versions in our manuals.  If you have the new manual then we are learning based on what is in there.  Our classroom maps are from a previous cycle and this posed a challenge since they are very different.  The girls did not complain since they were simply having fun finding each place and marking it with a skittle which they were able to eat as I read the names in the following story.

The lion of JUDAH lumbered slowly up through ISRAEL with JORDAN the Jaguar.  Then they     got thirsty and went back to get a drink in the DEAD SEA.  "Too salty!" so they used the PHOEN-ICIA (phone) to call the SEA OF GALILEE to make sure it tasted better.

Timeline

We went over the CC timeline hand motions that go along with each card.  The girls are doing well with this.  I will be reviewing the previous weeks motions with them as we go along just to help with the retention of these.  Here is the link for the motions for this week.  You can search for rafikipaka and that will give you a list of all the videos that are up for the hand motions at the moment.  There are also some videos of the hand motions set to the timeline song.  Again, I am not currently teaching to the song.  This may be something I do over time but right now I am teaching the girls the titles on the timeline cards and the hand motions.  We do listen to the timeline song during review time.

History

I used a matching game printable that I found on CC connected and cut it into 12 necklaces or 6 pairs representing each of the Greek and Roman gods that were mentioned in our weekly song.  Each girl got one necklace and then found her match (ex. Zeus/Jupiter, Ares/Mars, Diana/Hera, etc.).  Once they were partnered up I played the history song from the CD and we danced with our partners while singing the song.  We only had 6 girls this past Friday so we were able to do this activity twice. Below are pictures of the matching game and then what they looked like as a necklace.  If you would like the MS Word document containing the game please email me and I will send the file to you.

English

We continued learning the motions that go along with the Classical Conversations Prepositions Song as found on the audio CD.  Here is a link to the video that has the motions we learned.  I also have a word document for the motions if it is helpful to see the motions in writing since the video is fast.  Again, send me an email request for this and I will send it your way.

Latin

We practiced singing the memory work along with the song on the CD.  We also looked at these pictorial phonetic spelling charts to help the girls with the pronunciation of the different endings.  I will stress that at this age-level we are going for exposure to the language and not mastery.  If they get in the ballpark with the pronunciations then we are on the winning team.

Math

With skip counting 5's we did a basic hand play with partners (like Ms. Mary Mac but simplified) as we sang the song.  The correlation was each has five finger so every clap was another count of 5.  The girls seem to love math and pick it up very quickly. 

Skip Counting 6's we borrowed a great activity created by Jen Manning, the Abecedarian Boy's Tutor.  I wish I had taken a picture.  She used egg cartons for illustrating the counting process.  They were divided up into 12 sets of 6.  Each egg cup counted as one and then she circled every sixth number.  There are lots of ways that you could take this same concept and run with it for all age groups.  I made a smaller version at home to use for my 2-year-old as a counting activity.  Please note, the one pictures is set up in a group of 12 not 6 and I left the lid intact so that I could close up the activity with materials inside if I chose. Feel free to post extensions ideas on that in the comments section below.

Science

 We learned the science memory work set to the song the Itsy Bitsy Spider.  One of the other tutors fit it nicely to The Wheels on the Bus but I couldn't get that tune  to work out well for me.  Funny how what works perfectly for one tutor is a struggle for another one. This is the wording that I used to make it fit. 

Parts of an animal cell are nucleus and cytoplasm, vacuole, mitochondria, cell membrane and golgi bodies.

We were truly blessed by Heather Hoffman, Caylee's mommy) and her creativity when she bought in a cake representation of an animal cell as both a model and a yummy treat. She used icing, a cupcake and different types of candy to represent all the parts of the cell.    I will post a picture if she is able to send one in.  It was yummy...I mean informative!

Experiment

We asked the questions:
"Why do some animals live underground in the dessert?"
and
"How does and animal's color protect them from predators?"

These were outside activities.

Fine Arts

Upside-down Images

I began by using basic shapes to draw an image on the board step-by-step while the girls copied me.  I named each basic shape as it was used.  The girls guessed what we were drawing about halfway through but they humored me anyway.

When finished, I flipped my board over to look at the image in it's upright form.  Next,  they added trees, clouds, birds and/or a sun to their picture and colored them in.  
  
Hope this blesses you during your week!

Jenny