Week 35 Overview

The months of April and May have flown and we have just finished our next to last week of school. Only 5 more days left. Here is what we have been up to in week 35.

First, we started out the week with a visitor. A 3 year old, boy visitor. You won't believe it. He listened to all the read aloud and history. He read independently for 30 minutes when our 3rd graders did their own reading. He colored when they colored. Played piano when they played piano. And we got all our work done! That was the most impressive part of the day!

We got to have our last piano lessons for the year at Mrs. Dix house on her baby grand piano. That was a treat! We will meet this Sunday for our Family Music Night at Mrs. Dix's home.

Bible ~ Letters to encourage Christians
Hebrews; James; 1, 2 Peter; 1, 2, 3 John; Jude

Jesus keeps every promise the Old Testament makes. Jesus makes us able to love God and love others.
One of the truths we keep coming back to each week is that it is not enough to believe who God is and even who Jesus is. Even those that were cast out of heaven know those things to be true. The difference is who we serve, who our Lord is, who we submit to... if we are willing to confess our sin, repent, and live in Christ.

History ~

William Shakespeare
Shakespeare was born 6 years after Elizabeth I took reign. She loved music, composers, and poetry and she loved William Shakespeare's plays. He wrote comedies (checkout Taming of the Shrew!), tragedies (Hamlet), and historical plays (Henry V). He wrote more than 40 plays in all and they have been performed over and over for the last 450 years! Many things we say come from his plays. Here is an example:
You're going to eat me out of house and home! - from Henry IV, part 2
We listened to a synopsis of the tragedy Macbeth. Queen Elizabeth probably enjoyed this play because it showed that a nobleman who plotted treason against a ruler would come to a bad end.

New Ventures to America ~ Walter Raleigh, John White, and the lost colony
Basically, during Elizabeth's reign, Elizabeth didn't want Spain becoming more powerful than England (Spain was setting up colonies in North and South America) so, she sent Walter Raleigh to set up a colony in Virginia (Roanoke Island, now in North Carolina) in 1584. There were two attempts and both failed. Unrelated, Walter secretly married one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting and when the Queen found out, she had them thrown in the Tower of London. After her death, he was released and the new king said he would spare his life if Walter went to South America and brought back gold. When Walter returned empty handed, the king had him beheaded.

During the attempt at a colony on Roanoke Island, John White (one of the settlers) had to leave his family and travel back to England in search of food. When arriving in England, Raleigh was filling a ship with provisions for White, but Elizabeth I had to use the ship to fight the Spanish Armada, so White was unable to return to Roanoke for 3 years. When he returned, the colony was gone, never to be seen again. The lost colony is a mystery.

The Spanish Armada and England- check out the photo above (photo in this post) to read about "fire ships". Interesting history!

Science for 6th ~ 
Human use of land impact on the ecosystem, methods farmers use to increase yield, expense of organic foods, farmed versus free range animals, make-up of dirt, soil layers, how farmers look after soil, weathering, how cover crops are beneficial, road crews and climate, and erosion.

Science for 3rd ~
requirements for fire, how fire spreads, how to put out different types of fire, natural versus synthetic materials, electricity, types of energy, conductors versus insulators, and electromotive force.

Math for 6th ~
Our 6th grader started reviewing and working in a new math curriculum for grades 8/7. So far, she has covered sequences, number lines with negative numbers, lines and angles, improper fractions and mixed numbers, computing with fractions, percents, elapsed time, measuring angles with a protractor, polygons, perimeter, exponents, and square roots. She's doing amazing!

Math for 3rd ~
We have had a fun time exploring more difficult multiplication problems, such as 287 x 54. Until now, we only used multiple digit factors x a single digit factor. Everyone picked up on this new skill very well. We also continued our practice of long division using a single digit divisor. We checked our mastery of skills retaught in the last couple of weeks.

Writing ~ Back to writing letters!

We played outside, played inside, practiced piano, and got to do some really fun and different lessons meant to increase reading comprehension. Sometimes it's beneficial to start with music or a painting before moving on to written stories. It's also beneficial to give students some sentence starters to help them formulate their thinking about the music, paintings, or stories. We will include some photos of our sentence starters in chart form in Week In Photos.

Happy learning!