Tuesday, 9/19/17

Today was spelling test day.  I explained that our goal here is to master our material, not to simply grade it and move on.  The emphasis should not be on the grade, but we should use this to study the missed words so we can improve! 

The class is working on memorizing the poem, “Afternoon on a Hill”.  We will have a couple more weeks to work on this poem before we record a recitation video!

In writing/literature class, Ms. Hilary taught the class about inference.  They used text evidence to infer what is going on in a story.  When children are young, stories spell out all of the facts.  However, it is important for them to learn to use their prior knowledge to help them infer things about the story that are not writing in black and white.  To help them understand the concept, Ms. Hilary used the song “In Summer” from Frozen… which was just a perfect example to get the kids thinking!  Because we know what happens to frozen things in summer, but Olaf doesn’t, we have knowledge that he does not.  In the movie, Kristof asks, “Should we tell him?”.  Because of our prior knowledge, we are able to infer what he means.

In history, the students are working on their interactive notebooks.  They started their section on Christopher Columbus, and continued to work on their compasses. 

In art, Ms. Nancy taught the class different watercolor techniques.  First, they used salt.  This technique creates little dots as the salt soaks up the paint.  They worked on dry brushing techniques, dabbing with the paper towel, painting on wet color, and other methods for painting different looks with watercolors.

During agriculture time, the kids got to hear all about our new steer and how we will be feeding him out to process.  They will get to see the growth over the next few months.  I explained how that steer decided to lift the gate off of the hinges early this morning, letting out the donkey, horse, and himself!  I spent time before class started wrangling animals…. Not fun! 

Although we meant to talk about dairy goats, we ended up learning a little about duck embryology instead.  Why?  Because I have duck eggs in the incubator, and I needed to candle them to see which ones are developing and which ones need to be thrown out!  Although some lessons are planned out, my agriculture class has to ebb and flow with the happenings of the farm!  Out of the 12 eggs that we candled, 10 of them had growing embryos inside.  We saw one that was not fertilized and another that was rotten!  The kid were able to see the difference between them, and how to spot the issues.  We'll check back on the duck eggs next week!

I’ll start sending home notecards on Thursday.  Notecards are simply a way for me to communicate with parents each day about assignments, behavior, or just to say it was a great day!  Everyone will get a notecard… no matter what!  I am a firm believer in communication, and sometimes teachers will wait until there is a big problem before they communicate with others.  For us homeschoolers, we are still learning how to learn in a group!  I feel that this skill is just as important as the content of the lessons, if not more so!  Parents cannot help their children improve if they aren’t connected to the classroom, so the blog and notecards helps bridge that gap.