What a crazy week! St. Patrick’s Day and Turkey’s birthday on Friday and Saturday, plus we’ve all had a terrible cold…but somehow, we managed to not only do school, but we even did it every day!

We took a break from our study of world religions to focus on St. Patrick. We did a more in-depth study of his life than we have in the past. We also learned about the way the Roman Catholic church chooses people to be Saints. The children were amazed by how many steps need to be followed before that title is given! We also did a study of “St. Patrick’s Breastplate,” especially as it is translated in our hymnal in the form of “I Bind Unto Myself Today.”

Math was actually not too bad this week. Turkey and Bunny worked on some more word problems, and then moved on to direct variations and reverse variations. Ladybug worked with some more fractions, and also started on decimal places and adding decimals. It was rather amusing to see her realize that adding numbers with decimals only to the hundredths place is just like adding money! We did decide to save the tests for next week, because no one wanted to take a test on St. Paddy’s Day!

Turkey and Bunny started a new chapter in science…so far, they’ve learned about Newton’s first law of motion. Ladybug is still learning about cephalopods.This week we covered the octopus and the chambered nautilus, which is a very strange creature!

Our history lessons focused primarily on Asia this week. We learned about the rise of Chairman Mao and the evacuation of the Republic of China to Taiwan, the partitioning of Vietnam, and the Korean War. We also briefly stopped in Africa to learn about apartheid.

We finally finished Treasure Island this week. The children were a little disappointed that we didn’t get to find out more about what happened to the characters after their return to Bristol…they were ready to read the nonexistent sequel! We did have fun talking about how we would have ended it if we were writing the story, and it was interesting to see what Turkey and Bunny came up with. Ladybug is still working on Greek myths…she especially enjoyed reading about Sisyphus this week, as well as Perseus, one of the few characters in mythology who actually had a happy ending.

This week will be another crazy week, with Chickadee’s birthday taking center stage. We have a fun field trip planned for that day, and hopefully, we’ll get the rest of our work done the other four days!