10/17/18

We began our day with a new set of animal jobs.  The kids are doing an awesome job jumping in and tackling something new!

The class got a reminder of why we should all remember to keep the tops on the feed containers. During the break, a top was left off of the layer pellets.  The next morning, my daughters headed out to do their chores... and found a very fat, sleeping opossum curled up right in the bottom!   Finally, we talked about the importance of cats here on the farm.  The cats have been working hard lately!  As the weather gets cooler, the mice have been out in full force.  I may need to get another barn cat to handle them!  

This lead us right into our story by James Herriot about the little kitten named Moses.  The class listened as I read the first few pages of the story today.  I paused every so often to explain tough words and to give examples here on our farm of things that were mentioned.  In the story, the vet comes to the farm to trim the hooves of a cow.  He talked about how difficult this job is, and how the cows kick.  I explained to the class that there is a cool invention that makes the job less stressful on the cattle and safer for the farmer!  There is actually a contraption that holds the cattle in a safe position and then just tips them over!  The kids found this totally fascinating... which means it would make for a great topic for our farm fusion writing assignment!

I also integrated some math into our agriculture lesson.  Our large hogs are growing, and today we taped them to figure out their weight.  I explained to the class how to measure the girth and length.  I gave them the formula for calculating weight: girth^2 x length / 400.  We practiced the calculations with some very easy numbers in class.  Then, I demonstrated how to measure on the hogs while the class tried it themselves with the mini-pigs!

We then discussed My Side of the Mountain.  We talked about active vs. passive voice in writing and how to avoid passive wording.  The kids will continue this at home with a worksheet using quotes from our novel.  Our next book will be Island of the Blue Dolphins.  We will continue pulling out biology, geography, and survival skills from the new book, just as we did My Side of the Mountain.  

After lunch (and more fire-starting practice, by popular demand!), we dove into geography. The kids took turns sharing their posters on different countries in North America. They really listened to my directions! These looked awesome! After we talked about each country, we began our unit on Central America. Although not a continent of its own, we will spend a few weeks focusing just on the countries of Central America next. At home, they will have a couple videos to help prepare for next week. Also, they have some pretty cool (optional) coloring sheets to review what they learned about North America.

After lunch (and more fire-starting practice, by popular demand!), we dove into geography.  The kids took turns sharing their posters on different countries in North America.  They really listened to my directions!  These looked awesome!  After we talked about each country, we began our unit on  Central America.  Although not a continent of its own, we will spend a few weeks focusing just on the countries of Central America next.  At home, they will have a couple videos to help prepare for next week.  Also, they have some pretty cool (optional) coloring sheets to review what they learned about North America.

They did an excellent job of learning the levels of classification!  The class is learning about the three domains.  We added these domains to our science notebook, and the students will have a reading assignment at home on the three.  This is a little tricky, so next week we will go back and discuss some terminology and cell structure that will help us understand these domains a bit better.

In art, the class is still working on their fall acrylic scene.  They were told to make a far away, distant scene... but next week they will learn why!