Thursday, 10/26/17

Today, the class spent some time doing morning farm chores and taking care of a little doe who injured her leg.  We moved the doe to a stall and kept an eye on her today.  Most likely, it is just a minor injury and she’ll be good as new soon. But, it’s best to be cautious and isolate her form the herd!

After our outdoor adventures in the cold October air, we headed in for a spelling review.  The group went through the list, discussing the spellings of difficult words and writing each one.  They will study this list at home Friday and Monday, as we will have a spelling test on Tuesday.  We are also working through vocabulary list 3 in Worldy Wise.  We’ll spend a couple weeks on this list.

In grammar class, both classes reviewed their at-home assignments.  We are not only working through our workbooks, but we are also taking it a step further.  I like to review as often as possible and push the students with some challenge problems before moving on to the next lesson.  It’s important that we master the material before moving on, and this is the best way to do so!  The Happy Horse Group learned more about direct objects today.  They added a Direct Object card to their grammar card stack, and we worked through direct object sentences together.   We also used their verb tense meters to help determine the tense of different verbs and helping verbs. 






The Girly Goats Group has been studying both direct and indirect objects.  They did a great job with this concept… until we added helping verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to the sentences.  I could tell that once the sentences became more complex, it was much more difficult to pull out the parts of speech.  We spent the day working through examples and reviewing sentences that have both a direct and an indirect object.   Both groups will be reviewing today’s lesson at home on Friday.  On Monday, both classes will attempt a worksheet of challenge sentences to diagram.

In writing class, both groups killed off the dreaded two words, “AND THEN”.  These words are often shoved between sentences, making your writing seem to drone on and on and on!  Today, Ms. Hilary taught bout transition words.  They learned many transitions, and then wrote paragraphs on their own.  All of these kids blew us away with their creativity, detail, and their use of transitions to improve their writing! 

In history class, the group learned about Colonial life.  They learned common names given to children during this time period.  They learned about the clothing they wore, the jobs they had, and the games they played.  The class took their Colonial cutouts and added them to their interactive notebooks.  They then used  the information that they learned today to create a description of their cut-out Colonial American families.  (We even noticed that some students used the transition words that they just learned in the previous class!  Yay!)

During science, Ms. Sally reviewed the types of soil.  The kids observed different types, and used adjectives to describe them in their science notebooks.  They added water to each of the three types of soil, writing down their detailed observations and sharing them with the group.  At the end of class, they constructed edible Earth layers!

Today, the class decided that they wanted to have a little Halloween party on Tuesday afternoon.  The kids can come in costume.  If you would like to bring in a treat to share, feel free!  We'll end our day with some snacks, music, and we'll have a spooky good time!