I can’t believe we’ve made it to February! Historically, this is my least favorite month of the year, because everything is so blah. Christmas seems like an eternity ago, but the end of the school year is still pretty far away. The weather is usually not the best. And there aren’t any special days (unless you’re into Valentine’s Day…I’m not) to break up the monotony. This year is different, though, because it’s a Winter Olympics year! So February isn’t looking too bad, even if our calendar is a little on the crazy side!
It’s been so nice to have a relatively normal week after all the crazy we’ve had since before Christmas. I say “relatively” because yesterday my students had a proposal for me. They said they’d do double lessons in all of their subjects if I would let them have today off. I couldn’t think of a good reason to say “no” to that, so we ended up with a four-day week that contained five days worth of work!
We’ve been studying a lot of interesting things this week. My four students are all over the place in their religion lessons. Turkey and Bunny have been learning about Joshua leading the Israelites. Ladybug is a little farther into the Old Testament, and got to read one of my favorite stories: Elijah and the prophets of Baal. Chickadee is even farther ahead of her siblings, and has started the New Testament, with stories about the Annunciation and the birth of John the Baptist.
Ladybug has been working with fractions and common factors in math. She kind of remembers learning about those topics before, but kind of not, so it’s almost like it’s new to her. Turkey and Bunny have been working with radicals, and they can’t remember why they used to think that was a difficult topic! Chickadee has been measuring in inches.
History has been a lot of fun. Turkey and Bunny learned all about Cyrus the Great, something Bunny was very excited about. Ladybug read about ancient Athens and Sparta, and their on-again off-again wars. Next week, she gets to move on to Alexander the Great, which is also exciting!
I’m really excited about our science lessons right now, too. Ladybug continued to learn about members of family bovidae, including bison and sheep, before moving on to family camelidae. Turkey and Bunny are learning about Mendelian Inheritance, and have been creating Punnett squares for various genetic traits. They even made an earlobe pedigree for our family! This is probably my favorite thing in biology, so it’s been a lot of fun to teach it!
We are nearing the end of both Heidi and Beowulf, and we started the final book in the Ramona series, Ramona’s World. Turkey and Bunny have also been working on writing assignments to show the emotions of characters in a story, while Ladybug is working on longer summaries of different literature selections.
Next week should be another fairly standard week, with the addition of the beginning of the Olympics, and some new lessons on South Korea…plus a bit of Korean cooking!