We’re another week closer to the end of the school year!
I can already see things starting to wind down. This week we finished our study of world religions with One God, Many Gods. I suppose I could try to find something we could do for another seven weeks or so, but we’ve already gone through three different books this year, so I’m not sure that’s necessary. We’ll continue to learn about the commemoration days that fall during the church year, and do Bible readings, but I think that will probably be it.
Math this week was declared “easy.” Turkey and Bunny worked with conjunctions and disjunctions, and also practiced writing inequalities on number lines and graphing systems of inequalities. Ladybug has continued to work with decimals.
Our history lessons were all over the world. We learned about Juan and Eva Perón in Argentina…and I had the Evita soundtrack stuck in my head for an entire day. We then traveled to Africa, where we focused on Belgians in the Congo…and I had “We Didn’t Start the Fire” stuck in my head for another day. We also studied events closer to home (and a world away!), when we learned about the start of the Cold War, the space race, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, Laika, and the moon landing. The end of our history text is rapidly approaching, and since it’s been stuck in my head, I’m planning to end our history study with a special lesson going over “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
Turkey and Bunny have now learned about all three of Newton’s laws of motion in science. After the test next week, they’ll move on to studying forces of nature, almost until the end of the school year. Ladybug finished her lesson on cephalopods, and started a new chapter on echinoderms. So far, we’ve covered sea stars, which we all agree are very interesting creatures!
Ladybug has covered all of Heracles’ tasks in her Greek Myths text, and will be moving on to Theseus next. After that, there are only a few chapters left…something else that we’ve almost finished! Turkey and Bunny began their first study of Shakespeare with As You Like It. We made it through the first act already. I have never read this play, so I was quite shocked to discover that it began with a wrestling match. Bunny was ecstatic, as she can’t wait for Wrestlemania on Sunday!
Turkey and Bunny have continued writing essays on the topic of their choice that are between 400 hundred and 500 words long. Turkey wrote about Theseus (without realizing that Ladybug will be reading that story next week!), and Bunny wrote about Lipizzaner horses (which was very exciting to Ladybug, my little horse enthusiast!). Ladybug is continuing to write summaries and do dictation in her writing course, and has also continued sentence diagramming in grammar.
I have been working on planning this year’s installment of summer school. We’re going to focus on Westward Expansion and pioneers in the U.S. and Canada. We have a lot of great local opportunities for field trips, and to places we haven’t really visited before. I’ve also been looking at what curriculum we’ll be using next school year, as I’m going to have to make some changes for my high school students. But first, we have to finish this school year…we have less than two months left!