It was hard to concentrate on school this week, because all I could think about was Cardinals baseball! But we persevered and except for a bit of a shortened day today, we managed to get everything done. It really is hard on the teacher, too, when something exciting is going on!
We continued our Reformation studies this week, adding lapbooks about Ulrich Zwingli, William Tyndale, and John Calvin. We also learned about Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. For our craft, we made illuminated letters, and then the children worked as “scribes” and illuminated a Bible verse (they were very relieved that I only made them do one verse!). We also looked at examples of different manuscripts that have illuminated letters…it’s amazing how intricate some of them are!
Ladybug is continuing to work on reading CVC words, and we’ve also been working on rhyming words. The rhyming isn’t going so well. She thinks rhyming means the first letter sounds are the same, and so far, I haven’t been able to find a way to get it through to her that it’s the end of the words that matter in rhyming. We tried playing some games, even involving Turkey and Bunny, but no luck. We’ll keep working at it…she’ll figure it out eventually!
In science, we spent the week learning about nutrition, which was a nice follow-up to our studies on the digestive system. The children have gotten a lot better about eating a variety of healthy foods as they’ve gotten older, but I think learning why it’s important to eat certain things really made an impact on them. Their big project for the week was coming up with a sample menu of healthy meals for a day, and I think they also gained a greater appreciation for my job of meal-planning.
In language arts, Turkey and Bunny worked on writing full paragraphs with topic sentences. I didn’t totally like the way Writing Strands approached this, as they were basically told to write the paragraph first, and then come up with the topic sentence. I don’t necessarily think that’s the best way to write a paragraph…I’d rather they write the topic sentence, and then the rest of their thoughts, because I think it flows better that way. Their paragraphs and topic sentences were good, though, so I guess it worked out OK.
We also covered intransitive verbs this week, had spelling and math tests, and finished reading about Heinrich Muhlenberg. We didn’t get to go on the field trip we were supposed to have last weekend, which was a big disappointment, but we do have one other field trip scheduled for this month, so hopefully that one will work out. We’re almost done with reformers, but we still have quite a few rulers to learn about in the next two weeks, and I saved our best two Reformation crafts for last. By the time we’re done with all that, it will almost be time for Thanksgiving school…exciting days ahead!