Finishing Up Old Testament Stories II

We are heading into two green MLB's... Yep, it's time for our second set of Science topics for the year. These will be Geology and Astronomy. And yes, Charles Kovacs did write a book which covers both of these two blocks:

I will only be using portions of this book, however, because I have some diagreements with it. The links above are to my webpages for both topics and, as always, I will start working on posting my notes as I organize myself and teach. But first I want to share last week and the start of this, and the beautiful wrap-up to our highly satisfying Old Testament Stories II.

Poem
a limerick by Michael Palin from Another Second Poetry Book

"Migration" from Creatures of Earth, Sea, and Sky by Georgia Heard

Math Practice
Montessori materials: Checker Board for static and dynamic long multiplication with one-digit, two-digit, and three-digit multipliers; Small Bead Frame for dynamic addition; Yellow Triangles for Area for the formula for calculating the area of a rectangle, parallelogram, and all three triangles

Mental Math (skip counting by 7s to 175)

Homework
Mrs. C's Arts Garden

Finding the Area of Trapezoids Task Cards

Operations with Fractions

Goldfish Haven

Division of the Day for Upper Grades

Using Multiples to Introduce Percents

Pythagorean Theorem Converse

Morning Pages (free choice creative writing time)
We do a variety of prompts, some serious and some silly. One favorite was, "Pretend you are any inanimate object or animal and you have just been inaugurated President of the United States. Write your inaugural speech."

Article of the Day
This is something new we are doing each day, based on the idea of teaching students to actively engage with nonfiction text (in preparation for writing all over their college textbooks). Here are some free graphic organizers for Article of the Week and a few high interest non-fiction text sets (PDF) if you want to introduce this idea. Since we get the daily newspaper, each child is reading, marking up, and sharing notes about an article every day.

And THANK YOU to two different people who have given us piles of National Geographic magazines! Those are also a great source of articles which interest students.

Farm Day at Dayempur Farm

Educational Games
I've been letting people choose between indoor and outdoor recess, depending on the weather. Here are some current favorites:

Recipes
Raisin Loaves
Fresh Vegetable Soup

Structured Word Inquiry

Science Activities
doing a "walking water" experiment (which failed twice)

growing a sweet potato vine:
1 glass of water + 1 sweet potato + 3 toothpicks

Current / Community Events
watching the presidential inauguration live (thank you, Twitter)
marching in the Women's March in Carbondale IL
attending the Science Lecture: "Global Stakes of Fresh Water"
looking up the 2017 Newbery and Caldecott winners and honors

Charcoal Drawing (second exercise)

Old Testament II
completing our Ark

making pairs of animal figures (needle felting, modeling beeswax)

doing a table reading of the play "Noah and the Flood"

drawing thrones upon thrones for King Nimrod

making the Tower of Babel out of clay

researching "cat" in 32 languages and "brick" in 40 languages for the Confusion of Tongues

splatter painting white paint on navy blue construction paper to make a million stars in the sky above Abraham

making What the Ancient Israelites Ate - Jacob's Lentil Stew recipe
(I used quick barley and this cooked up easily and was delicious!)

hyssop


sumac

watching the first half (about 50 minutes) of The Story of Jacob and Joseph

This post contains affiliate links to the materials I actually use for homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. Thank you for your support!