Cycle 1 Week 21

Here is the material that we covered in class for week 21. 

Geography

We traced our contoured maps and began labeling the continents.  Next, the girls labeled their map points for Canadian Provinces.

Timeline

We learned the hand motions for this week's timeline cards.

History

We colored in our history sentences pages while listening to the memory work.

Math

While learning the associative law I substituted A, B, and C with an apple, banana, and carrot respectively.  To represent the parenthesis I used a bowl.  This gives the girls a visual representation of an abstract thought and can serve as a manipulative for them to work with while learning the law.

Science

I set the memory work to Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.

Artic Circle (head)
Tropic of Cancer (shoulders)
Equator (waist)
Tropic of Capricorn (knees)
Antarctic Circle (toes)

English

We started learning about Linking Verbs this week.  Each week we will add links to a chain with that weeks verbs on each link.  we also have a new song to help us remember the memory work.

Latin

We reviewed our fourth declension noun endings and sang along with the memory work CD.

Fine Arts

During morning assembly we practiced the Orchestra Song and enjoyed a special guest who taught us about the double bass.  In our class we danced to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and continued working on out Orchestra Books. 

Experiment

We began our more in-depth study of minerals and how to identify them.  We also enjoyed listening to our special guest Brittaney Rudd who discussed with us the role of a geologist, their tools, mineral formation and how to use the tools to identify minerals.

I hope you are all having a blessed week!

Cycle 1, Week 20

Here is a brief rundown of what we covered this past Friday.

Geography

The girls traced the detailed contoured map.  Next, we located our MesoAmerica map points using fruit loops cereal.

Timeline

We learned the hand motions for this week.

History

We colored the picture sentences as we listened to the memory work a few times.  This would have been a fun song to play maraccas, clackers, etc. with.

English

The girls sang our final week of the Helping Verb song both as solos and as a group.

Latin

We played freeze dance to the memory work.

Science

After explaining that we were going on a pretend hunt for an Alien.  We went through all the layers of the atmosphere while hunting for our "alien" that was hidden in the room earlier in the morning. This comparable to Going on a Bear Hunt.  The layers were as such:

Troposphere - We climb the tallest mountain and jumped onto an airplane
Stratosphere - We pretend we were floating along with a weather balloon
Mesophere - We pretended we were meteors
Thermosphere - We boarded our space shuttle and flew around
Exosphere - We exited our shuttle in our space suits and took a space walk to find the "alien"

Math

I added in the last installment of the Math Pokey.  We went through all the previous weeks and then added in the circumference of a circle.  while drawing a circle in the air we sang:  "The circumference of a circle is 2Pi times the radius" 3times.  When finished off with the chorus of "Do the math Pokey".

Fine Arts

We enjoyed our large group activity with Ms. Julie and the rest of Foundations.  We finished off this study with discussing Handel's Water Music and for what prupose it was written.  Each girl chose an aspect of river/water life/travel to intepret on their on and when moved to the music using dance streamers.  Some of the ways the girls chose to interpret the music was as the water, as a fish, as a mermaid ballerina, as a seahorse, etc.  These were their own unique interpretations. 

Experiment

We labeled a paper model of the Earth and its layers as well as the atmosphere and its layers.

Cycle 1 Week 19

I hope that your families have been able to enjoy our "spring" break from classical this past week.  It came at a perfect time for our family with sickness and extra craziness going on.  Here is a review of our meeting time from week 19.

Geography

First, we traced the outlines of the detailed world map.  Some of the girls are getting fast enough at this to trace it twice or to begin labeling the names of the continents.  Next, we used tri-colored cereal to mark our map points.

History

The girls colored their history sentences as we listened to the audio of the memory work.

Math

We continued our Math Pokey by adding in the Area of of a circle.  To the tune of the Hokey Pokey we sang the area of a circle memory work three times while making a big circle with one arm.

Timeline

We reviewed week 19's hand motions and then I quizzed them to see who could remember each motion.

Science

We sang a simplified ocean zones song from the movie Finding Nemo.  It was nice of Pixar to do all the work for me and make up a song for this week :).  I also showed the girls a graphic of the ocean zones that included sea life that you might find in each zone.  The girls chose an animal from the zone of focus and pretended to be that animal/plant as they swam around the table (which was blue) and we all sang the memory work song together.  We repeated this three times, once for each zone.  We we got to the abyssal zone I turned off the lights to simulate the dark nature of this zone. 

 

Latin

We practiced our memory work to the video as we looked at the pictograms for this week.

English

We are nearing then end of our helping verbs song.  Each girl has been very excited to sing the song solo (sometimes with a little assistance from me) in front of the whole class.  Even our shy friends have been wanting to give it it try!  So proud of them.  Since my original post of this song was lost when the blog crashed I am reposting it below.

Fine Arts

Renee Wimberly did a fabulous job of leading all of foundations in learning the orchestra song.  She will be leading the first 25 minutes of this lesson each week and we might have some guest musicians coming in to share their talent with us as well.  During class we are focusing on specific composers, instruments or arrangements.  This week I played an excerpt from each of the three arrangements that we will focus on this cycle in the coming weeks.  As I played each one the girls moved to the music in a way that conveyed their interpretation of the piece.  The first piece we pretended we were trees as we moved to the music.  Sometimes we swayed as in a gentle breeze and others our leaves shook quickly to the faster parts.  The next piece the girls pretended to be pigs as they moved to the music (their choice).  The final piece the girls pretended to either be grapes or be moving through grapes as they moved to the music (again, their choice).  This was an amazing interpretation and thy thought about what having grapes in our environment would do to our ability to move or the way we moved.  The girls that chose to be grapes pretended they were either rolling or even a squished grape as they  moved.  One even pretended to be purple and moved in a way that they thought purple would move.  Loved watching their imaginations explore as they interacted with the music.

Science Experiment

We studied rock formation this week.  Before class I put together borax and water so that by the time we observed the jar with string in it during our experiment time we were able to observe the rock forming.  We talked about the process that the minerals undergo to form a rock.  We also had a chance to observe rocks with a magnifying glass and discuss the features we observed and the differences that observed between the different types.

Hope you have a great time learning together this week!