Hatch Day!

Spelling-  We went over the spelling list today, reviewing the tricky words.  For some of them, spelling is such an easy thing to master, and for others, it is far more work.  I love that we are in a small, open, supportive environment where we can actually discuss (and embrace) these differences!  Today, it lead to a discussion about how the world must have different people with different abilities, or else things just simply would not work!

Grammar-  We are down to the last few lessons in grammar, so we are reviewing all of the concepts learned this year.  Because of this, I am personally able to sit back and soak in the amount of information these children have attained!  Direct objects, predicate nominatives, predicate adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions... they are truly sponges!

Math- After a bried review of long division, it was suggested that we play one of our division card games.  And so... that is what we did!  The kids each chose 3 cards.  They took the largest number and it was used as their divisor.  They took the other two numbers and put them in order, largest to smallest.  This created a two-digit dividend.  Then, they worked to find the quotient.  The one with the smallest quotient collected all of the cards! So funny how adding a deck of cards can make division so much more fun!

Agricultural Ed- Today was the last day of our agricultural workshop. Thank you so much to all of the students who came out and joined us! Today, we were able to see our eggs hatching! There were eggs that had already hatched, some that were pipped, and some zipping. You can't ask for a better display!

If you remember, we did some math to figure out that our eggs should have, in theory, hatched the following colors: 50% Blue Copper Marans, 37.5% Splash Marans, and 12.5% Black Copper Marans.

Out of our 18 maran eggs, only 12 hatched. Of the eggs that hatched, we have 8 blue copper marans, 2 splash marans, and 2 black copper marans. That means that, out of the 12 eggs that hatched, 67% were blue copper marans, 16.5% were splash marans, and 16.5% were black copper marans. Who knows that theones that didn't make it would have been!

After watching our chicks in action, we read the book "Tops and Bottoms" by Janet Stevens.  I don't care how old a class is, EVERYONE enjoys being read to.  When they read this book to us in a Farm Bureau Educational Leadership Conference, I was humored at how all of us adults were just as into the book as any child would be!  After reading the story, we discussed how we eat the "tops" of some plants and the "bottoms" of others.  Then, the students did an activity where they cut and pasted each vegetable into either the "tops" position, or the "bottoms" one.  They learned where the edible part of the celery is, as well as broccoli, onion, cabbage, and more!  So often we assume that children know about the food we eat.  In fact, many of us have a lot to learn!

Science- Today was our physics finale!  The kids learned about pulleys as they created a very hungry alligator.  We reviewed potential and kinetic energy, and the class did an amazing job of working together as a group to make the alligator come to life!

Social Studies-      The class read about the Industrial Revolution today.  They answered reading comprehension questions and a map reading activity involving immigration.  They also used a chart to determine the number of immigrants that came from different countries from 1840-1880. 

Writing- We finished "Hamlet for Kids" today!  Wow.  What a tragedy!  The class was absolutely dumbfounded that a story could end with so much death and woe!  The students worked on their summaries, which are just coming along so nicely!  I heard the words, "I need more paper!" twice today.  Are these the same children that we started with in August?  The ones that groaned and moaned at the idea of writing a 3-5 sentence paragraph?  Amazing.  Simply amazing.

We are going to be finishing up our summaries, and working to revise and edit them.  However, there is no way that they will be able to complete these masterpieces in the short time that we have left... and read them to the class!  So, although we will hopefully wrap them up in the next two weeks, I would love for each student to read their summaries on video.  Send these to me, and I will post them!  With such an online audience, I am sure they will work even harder to make them fabulous!