Sunday, February 18, 2018

Africa Week Two

This week students continued to work on their Africa reports. We were thrilled when my new 11 x 17" Africa stencil arrived from Waseca Biomes!
I invite parents to come by the classroom to check it out, along with all the other cool Geography materials we've been using! The oldest students presented Africa book reports on Thursday. We like the fun options in the FREE Not Your Grandma's Book Report: 30 Creative Ways to Respond to Literature.

The first student shared a book set in Sudan, The Red Pencil, and she did #7, the Book in a Bag. Because Leah felt her book summary would be too violent for the younger students, they played outside while she presented. Her classmates scored her using our Oral Book Report rubric and gave her a 15/16. The next report was for a book set in Kenya, Burn My Heart, and he did #16, the Map. His classmates gave him a score of 12/16. Finally, Becca presented her book which took place in Ancient Egypt, The Golden Goblet, and she did #17, the Sculpture. Her classmates gave her a 13/16.

Becca did her own independent block on Ancient Egypt this year and started a chicken mummy on January 15th. She has been working on it for a month, changing out the wet salt and covering it with new dry salt every few days. After a month we declared it fully dried out (12 boxes of Morton kosher salt later... an astonishing 36 lbs!) and so she wrapped it in front of the class as part of her report and placed it into a cardboard pyramid-shaped tomb complete with a scroll in hieroglyphs wishing Cluckopatra well in the afterlife. Her book was all about a tomb robbery and so it was a perfect fit!


Of course, we are continuing to read picture books as a whole group each day, to help us learn as much as possible about Africa. Here were the books for Week Two:


I've done a lot of posts lately and I've been super busy (the Newbery and Caldecott winners on Monday, the Philosophy class on Tuesday, the Science clubs on Thursday and Friday, the library workshop in Effingham on Saturday, the Winter playdough recipes on Sunday, the summary of last week's lessons on Africa) but this week is our last week of school before Spring Break. I'll share photos from the classroom as well as our final week of Africa... and then I'm going to RELAX and have two weeks of Spring Break (during which time I will have July Duty)!

I know it's been a lot but I love sharing and I hope it is helpful as opposed to overwhelming!!!


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

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