Tuesday's Active Learning Group and Week in Review 3/4-3/8

Duncan and I decided to share our last trimester studies by inviting a group of friends to share our introductory day on Tuesdays. So, here is what we did in just under three hours with a group of six middle schoolers and a kindergarten tag-a-long using a little Waldorf, a little Montessori, and a little lapbooking and then tying it all together with Charlotte Mason's patience and short lessons.

Active Learning Group Week 1 

I. Poetry

    A. Introduce ourselves

    B. Define poetry, stanza, end rhyme, and poetic license

    C. Read and discuss Fields section of TheTree That Time Built

 II. Geometry

    A. Short quote about geometry

    B. Brief biography of Euclid (I used the info in the first 2 paragraphs and in the last 2 paragraphs.)

    C. County map to discover points, lines and line segments

    D. A starry night drawing to discover rays

This is my teaching sheet. It is made from small pieces of water color paper glued to a 12x18" sheet of black construction paper.

Mei's County Map

Mei's Starry Sky

Mei's Definition Sheet

III. Biology- Introduction to Botany

    A. Lead students in the Activity for Introducing Botany

    B. Tell the made-up story of Elzeard Bouffier. Here is the story on youtube. I have the book, but told the story more like the woman in the video except with a Southern accent. :)

    C. Read poem Smells by Kathryn Worth 

    D. Define botany

    E. Give students choice of activities

        1. draw tree from my instruction sheet

        2. copy poem from my instruction sheet

        3. work with the parts of a flower set

        4. work with Montessori 3-Part Plant cards

        5. fill in the parts of plant mini-book

This is my instruction sheet. I drew it on 18x24" drawing paper.

Close up of the top left

Close up of the bottom right. This was here.

First page of Duncan's plant mini-book on left and the coordinating teaching card on right

Montessori 3-Part Cards

Parts of a flower learning booklet, pictures from the booklet, and definitions to match to the pictures

IV. Social Studies- Achaemenid Persia week 1 of 4

    A. Physical geography of Iran

    B. Story of Esther 

    C. Fill in a mini-book retelling the story of Esther using WIN's The 7 SentenceStory

    D. Eat hamantaschen

The outside of Sevanne's Esther mini-book, the inside of Mei's mini-book, and the inside of Duncan's mini-book. At the end of the 4 weeks they will be able to put all their work on Achaemenid Persia into a lapbook.

Duncan and I made hamantaschen on Monday and shared them with the group on Tuesday. Here is our hamantaschen ready to go into the oven.

I am not giving grades or assigning homework. This is just a casual three hours of fast-paced introduction of topics. My son will be doing more work with the poetry after reading the poems on Tuesday using the student pages from Moving Beyond the Page Ages 10-12- Concept 4: Systems and Interaction, Unit 2: The Tree That Time Built (LA). Duncan is using MUS Geometry, so this geometry on Tuesday is just for fun. Because he is using Science Daybook the rest of the week, Duncan will not be doing anything else with botany unless he wants to explore it further on his own. He will not be specifically working on the ancient culture introduced, but will be studying that region of the world through stories, poetry, literature, and cultural geography.This week he continued reading in Clouds of Glory, a collection of Jewish Midrashim, and A Picnic of Poems: In Allah's Green Garden. He also read two books by Demi: Rumi and Muhammad.

I guess this is all the stuff that is interesting to share, but he also watched a couple of MUS Algebra 2 videos and did some MCP Word Study, Evan Moor Daily Math, Evan Moor Daily Paragraph Editing, Kumon Math, and Time4Writing.

Who are you?

`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

Goals for 5th Grade

Short Term:
In 5th grade I would be thrilled to see him become as excited over anything educational as he becomes fairly frequently while playing MMOs, because last year was a dead zone as far as educational joy.


Long Term:
I want my child to be firm in his knowledge of appropriate conduct. I want him to learn the difference between what he wants to do right now and having a strong enough will to do what is appropriate/ right. He must also be taught to be careful not to rationalize something to be right simply because he wants it to be so. Along these lines, there can be no true happiness without first taking care of responsibilities. “…the chief responsibility which rests on them as persons is the acceptance or rejection of ideas. To help them in this choice we give them principles of conduct, and a wide range of the knowledge fitted to them.”

"I am, I can, I ought, I will." is the place from which I instruct, because we achieve through diligence not through intelligence or imagination. I use habit training as a road to success, because I want him to be a responsible, decent, moral person who possesses positive and productive physical and mental habits. I want him to learn to apply these habits to whatever he chooses to do in life whether that is a tinker, a tailor, a soldier, or a sailor.

I exercise habit training alongside the idea that “perhaps the business of teachers is to open as many doors as possible.” I respect that he is born whole and that his mind is naturally designed to learn. I can provide the nourishment of education for his mind to grow healthy through a learning lifestyle where he is trained to be disciplined not in subject matter but in life for "education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life."

However, my child is not a blank slate, but is a whole person complete with his own personality and capacity for good and evil. Neither my self worth nor his hinges upon his going to college. I will for my part try to open doors and windows and widen chinks in the walls, but ultimately he will choose his own path. I hope that he chooses one that is fulfilling.

Mandy, with quotes from Charlotte Mason

Our Core Book

We do half our year before winter break and half after winter break. Years that are divided into trimesters stink, because the middle trimester is split in two. So, one thing that I strongly prefer is quarters over trimesters. I would really like eight weeks and an exam week to make a 9 week quarter.


I am very happy with the CM-ish/ classical-ish work that we will be doing this year. I created a lesson plan/ core book that seems to be working well. I turned a word doc to landscape, let my little man pick a background color, typed The Well-Nourished Mind across the top, underneath this I typed Overview of Weekly Topics for Recreation, Recitation, and Reproduction, and inserted 6 text boxes. I like this style of Guide.

Text box 1 is narrow and runs about 2/3 of the page with the words artist, composer, poet, life skills/ handicraft, nature walk, and unstructured play/ masterly inactivity. Text box 2 is wide and also runs 2/3 of the page. It has space for memory work in English grammar, cultural geography, political geography, science, Latin, and Farsi. Running underneath and the length of boxes 1 and 2, box 3 goes to the bottom of the page and is my space for dictation. Box 4 begins at the top runs 3/4 of the way to the bottom and is where I will place the poem that the little man is working to memorize. Box 5 is in the little space below box 4 and has space for the title of the literature book he will be working on with room underneath to check off 2 days of narration and 2 days of reading aloud. Text box 6 is narrow and runs the length of the doc for spelling words.

Week in Review, 7/2-7/6

Duncan is my 9yo and this week we started fourth grade.

Well, here we are again. I had expected to begin our new year next week, but as it turns out there are some days next week when we will not be able to do school. So, we stretched two days scheduled for next week over three days this week. We started memory work and he made index cards, but, since he is expected to have it memorized by next week, I will post the week 1 memory work with next week's week in review. It wasn't a stellar start in attitude, quantity, or quality, but at least the ball is rolling.

In Religious Studies and Mythology this partial week
Selections from The Children’s Bible in 365 Stories by Mary Batchelor

Artist, Composer, Poet Study this partial week
Benjamin Britten: Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. We listen to two broadcasts online at Classics for Kids- The Instruments of the Orchestra - Part 1 and Part 2. Then, we listened to the entire piece on youtube. This was definitely a good review and a good start to the year.

The Blue Rider: The Yellow Cow Sees the World in Blue pp. 1-11 focusing on Kandinsky. We are going to cover this book quickly for an overview of the group, but later this quarter we will be covering the works of Franz Marc in detail.

Color Me a Rhyme by Jane Yolen pp.8-17
Duncan memorized Orange.

Orange

by Jane Yolen

I want to take a bite

out of that sunset sky,

letting the orange juices
run down my chin,

spitting out the pulp

onto the rocks below.

  
In Math this partial week
We have not totally stopped doing Kumon Math this summer even though this past month has been more than somewhat inconsistent. This week we managed to squeeze in 2 days- H 181-185 and H 186-190. The plan is to begin Duncan's math text 7/16, his first full week of school.

In Language Arts this partial week
This week Duncan began reading Rascal by Sterling North. He read chapters 1 and 2, so of course now he wants a raccoon as a pet. This book was a huge favorite with my big boys so I am glad to now be sharing it with the little man. As a read-together, we began It's Our World, Too! He completed Harvey's Elementary Grammar and Composition- Lessons 1 and 2 alongside the first two lessons in the coordinating Mott Media's series 4 workbooks and Spectrum Writing 5- Lesson 1. We also began looking at Webster’s 1824 Speller from Don Potter’s site and started Figuratively Speaking Lesson 1: Denotation and Connotation.

In Geography this partial week
In cultural geography Duncan read about the Mound Builders. In physical geography he reviewed the continents and oceans. He also completed the first two days of week 1, the introductory week, from WinterPromise's Children Around the World. We are using the 2008 print edition that uses How People Live as its spine.

In Science this partial week
Duncan completed lesson 1 from Memoria Press's fourth grade science- Insects. This is a beta test book and the reader had a number of typos in lesson 1, so I ended up reading it aloud to him. I didn't notice any errors in the workbook.

In Foreign Language this partial week
Duncan began Lesson 1 in Latin Primer: A First Book of Latin for Boys and Girls and completed the introduction section in Your First 100 Words in Persian.

On the Violin this partial week
On violin this month Duncan is working on mastering song 1 from Suzuki book 2- Chorus from Judas Maccabaeus, William Tell Overture from Essential Elements for Strings book 1, and the Star Wars Theme Song. (Because math comes so naturally for Duncan, I had hoped that this would also be the case with violin. Uhhm- not so. He practices a little and goes to lessons, but unless there is a huge change this is not something that I see being a huge part of his future in any way other than for the fun of it.)

Week in Review, 04/09-04/14

Duncan is my third grader. This week he finished reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord and Walking to Freedom by Richard Kelso. He also finished a chapter about the Civil Rights Movement in America's History: Land of Liberty Vol.2. He read some poetry from The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems and he finished his Spectrum 5th grade Phonics and Word Study.

In Time4Learning he continued working in the grammar section of the grade 4 language arts. He also continued working on the grade 3 language arts extentions and science.

On Tuesday, Duncan began Moving Beyond the Page: Age 8-10, Concept 3: Similarities and Differences. He read a book called Akimbo and the Crocodile Man by Alexander McCall Smith and most of Africa for Kids by Harvey Croze. He researched crocodiles and reptiles. He learned about some unique African animals and wrote a paragraph on crocodiles and a paragraph on the aardwolf. He wrote out food webs for the African rainforest, fynbos, savanna, and desert. He made a construction paper and paper towel tube crocodile. We read and he typed The Crocodile by Lewis Carroll. We discussed onomatopoeia, modifiers, and conflict. He edited a paragraph from Akimbo. He wrote a daily journal entry on Akimbo and the Crocodile Man in the form of a comparison between himself and Akimbo. He learned about the countries, cultures, and geographic regions of Africa. He compared some aspects of African and American culture. We discussed slavery in Africa today and he created an awareness flyer. He looked at the lives of three very different African children, wrote a summary of each, and compared them to his own. He started a report that was supposed to be on an African country, but instead he decided to focus on an African culture. After one week of MBtP, I can say that it is a very full program. It will take a good chunk of time each day to complete.

 
Outside the house or extras:
He practiced violin and had a lesson this week. He went to his math tutor. He worked on Kumon math and went to the center. He went to art and drama. Next week he has a dress rehearsal for their play. We went on a field trip to a working farm. I had thought that we would be there for perhaps a couple of hours at the most, but we ended up being there in the sun for four hours and I burned. :-( On Sunday my nose peeled.

Mei in black T and Duncan in green tie-dye

Oh, and last weekend my 18yo, Grayson, went to the anime convention.

Week in Review, 4/2-4/6

Duncan is my third grader. This week he finished reading Ultra Hush-Hush and Spying and the Cold War by Michael Burgan. He started reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord. He practiced violin, but didn't have a lesson this week. He went to his math tutor. He worked on Kumon math and went to the center. He read some poetry from The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, completed some pages in his Spectrum 5th grade Phonics and Word Study, and finished a chapter about the cold war in America's History: Land of Liberty Vol.2. We had our last meeting of Classical Conversations.

Duncan finished his math section of Time4Learning. Previously, he completed language arts and started the next level. Since finishing social studies last week, he has been completing two language arts extensions in a sitting to work on finishing up that section. After he completed math, he began working through two science lessons in a sitting.

Next week Duncan will begin Moving Beyond the Page: Age 8-10, Concept 3: Similarities and Differences. At least this is the plan! I just ordered it on Wednesday and UPS tracking says that it should be here on Monday. I am excited that we will be starting something new! We did a little unit of MBP a number of years ago, but never a full concept. I can't wait to see how it goes.

The game plan is that he will work through the MBtP concept and then, the second week of July, begin a world geography and world cultures study using WinterPromise's Children around the World as a spine. :-)