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!