We’ve been dealing with a horrid stomach virus for the last two weeks, so I never did get around to my wrap-up last Friday. I decided to just go ahead and do both weeks together…even with the illness, we only missed two days of school, so there’s a lot to cover!

Last week we spent a lot of our religion lessons learning about the Reformation. We never did get around to reading our Martin Luther book, though…that’s just what happens when the teacher gets sick! We started our “thankful tree” this week…it’s nice to spend a month really thinking about the things we should be thanking God for every day!

Turkey and Bunny have been working on exponents and square roots in math, and today we entered into the world of scientific notation. I sure don’t remember learning that in grade six! Ladybug has been working on regrouping, and carrying with three and four-digit numbers.

Language arts has been pretty routine. Turkey and Bunny have been working on writing descriptions of places, and this inspired Turkey to write a story of his choosing on his own time. It’s quite good (if I do say so myself), and pretty long, so it was quite an undertaking. Ladybug is continuing to work on writing summary sentences and dictation, in addition to learning about adjectives.

Our history lessons have covered the Vikings and the first kings of England. This is one of my favorite periods to study! The children enjoyed making and decorating their own Viking longboats. They also really enjoyed learning about feudalism, and what it would be like to live as a serf vs. living as a lord.

In science, we’ve been learning all about leaves. We finally went on our nature walk yesterday, but we didn’t get to Forest Park…we stuck a little closer to home. I am still hoping that we might visit St. Louis’ biggest park next week, but who knows? Each child collected quite a few leaves, and when we got home, they identified them by shape, venation, margin, and simple/compound. Next week, we’re going to try to identify what kind of tree they each came from.

We finally finished reading The Hobbit. I’m really sad we’re done with it, and I’m now very reluctant to see the movies, as it’s fairly obvious even to me that they screwed the story up. The children had a fun time building a Lego: The Hobbit set this afternoon (the Lake Town chase scene), even though because it’s based on the movie, it doesn’t quite match up with the story.

Since even the teacher likes to have fun, I built the Lego: The Hobbit Barrel Escape set to go along with the children’s set. It was my favorite scene in the book, so it seemed appropriate, and when I found it on clearance, I couldn’t resist!

Next week should be pretty basic…we’ll still be catching up a bit from the days we missed this week, but we have to get all our regular stuff done so we can get started on Thanksgiving School!