Sneaky, Cruel, Mean, and Nasty

HISTORY - The Brames came over for our usual Monday meeting. We watched the Great Courses DVD about the Byzantine Empire. We learned that the Byzantines would do almost anything to get to the top of their political ladder. They had 88 emperors, 29 of which met violent deaths by the hands of their successors. In fact, the term "byzantine politics" is still used today to describe anyone whose political tactics are sneaky, cruel, mean or nasty (the four words the video presenter kept referring to). We learned about the emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora, both of whom rose from being poor servants to become the rulers of this vast empire. The kids made paper dolls of Justinian and Theodora. We also learned about the Hagia Sophia, the great church of Constantinople and we did a compare and contrast of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire (Byzantium) and the Western Half of the empire, noting that out of the Western half came the Roman Catholic church based in Rome and from the eastern half comes the Eastern Orthodox Church based in Constantinople with branches known as Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox. We read the story of the original St. Nicholas and decided that we would like to honor him by giving some secret gifts to others on Dec. 6th. We also read a story called "Forks before Fingers" that told of the origin of forks being from the Byzantines.

MATH - New chapters in The Life of Fred brought some new adventures. In Apples, we talked about time, schedules, Days of the Week and Months of the year and continued practicing addition. Fractions introduced ordinal numbers as well as inches and feet. We had a lot of fun measuring each other and putting the final numbers in order then talking about who was 1st, 2nd, etc. We found out that Beryl (age 12) is only a fraction of an inch taller than Clarissa (9). We actually had to get out a level to see who was taller! Beryl and Jared continued to work on large numbers and had to subtract 7 from 1 million. They also read a story called "If You Made a Million" about earning money, interest, percentages, etc. and how to earn a million dollars.