Too Perfect

Sometimes our school is just too perfect and it's not because of anything I do. For instance, before school started I purchased the whole set of the Sir Cumference math books by Cindy Nueschwander knowing that they would go well with our Medieval history studies. For history this week our plan was to start our study of King Arthur so Christine suggested that we read Sir Cumference and the First Round Table. That was our plan, but we had no idea that The Life of Fred Fractions was going to introduce Radius and Diameter this week as well. While Fred talked about the diameter of pizza and bicycle wheels, the story of Sir Cumference and the First Round Table helped solidify in the kid's minds which measurement is the radius and which one is the diameter, plus added the measurement of circumference. It was one of those moments when the stars aligned and everything was just perfect.
HISTORY - While reading several versions of The Sword in the Stone the kids designed their own shields (Mon). They also colored wizards while I read about Merlin (Tues) and Princesses (or Knights) while I read about Guinevere (Wed). Also on Wednesday, we read more about Medieval life from the book, A Kaleidoscope Kids Book: Knights & Castles and learned about things like Chivalry and Honor. We decided to make our own Code of Honor. Each of us came up with ideas to add to our Code of Honor like: Obey your parents, Respect others, and Work first play later. Then we taped together two long pieces of paper, burned the edges with matches, painted the "parchment" with tea to antique it and Jared wrote out our Code of Honor with Old English lettering. Finally we each signed it, then Jared attached it to rolls to make it into a scroll and tied it with a red ribbon. On Thursday morning I had to refer to the Code of Honor to remind the kids about the rule of "work first, play later."



MATH - In Life of Fred Apples, we learned about negative numbers as the temperature outside dropped below zero (in the story), we also learned about counting by fives, and about deciduous trees. The girls played a temperature board game to reiterate below zero, did a skip count by 5s maze to get the page to the knight, and picked apples off of our deciduous tree to make their own apple fritters for lunch. Jared and Beryl played a $1000 board game to review large numbers. On Tuesday, we continued to learn more about circles by reading Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi. Then, we collected several circular items like lids and such and used yarn to measure the circumference and the diameter, finding out that the circumference string was always 3.14 times longer than the diameter string. We also went grocery shopping and Jared and Clarissa continued to learn about budgeting money as they had to purchase their items for cooking dinner on a $5 budget. On Thursday we read two math books, The Smushy Bus (basic artithmetic) and The Lion's Share (fractions).

SPELLING - To take advantage of the beautiful Fall weather outside, my creative idea this week for practicing spelling words involved DIRT! I gave each of the girls a plastic lid and had them go out into the garden and put dirt on their lid then practice writing their words in the dirt. They loved it, of course.

WRITING - Our Thursday writing assignment also took advantage of the nice weather. We all sat outside and the kids each wrote for about 20 min. about what they were observing outside. The girls did a great job and wrote a lot more than they usually would, but my favorite part was when Jared ended his writing by saying, "Life is good right now."