10/31/19

10/24/19

Today's farm news included meeting the new rescue bunny, Thumper, setting up the timer and lights on the coops, and a plea for unused jack-o-lanterns after Halloween.  The pigs love them!  The kids completed their animal chores and worked on their goat decoupage projects.  They will be completing these next week.  I'm so pleased with how they're turning out!


After snack, we talked about different ways that animals communicate.  I am constantly reading them to make sure they are all happy and healthy.  Whether it's through noises, tail wags, drooped ears, or ruffled feathers, they let us know how they are doing!  Goats communicate with each other through sounds, head butting, and tail wagging.  Chickens have different sounds to announce when they've laid an egg, call hens over to food, or "talking" to chicks.  I explained that humans also use verbal and nonverbal communication. 

 

We talked about ways that we can communicate effectively with friends and family.  Then, the kids worked in pairs on an activity.  They took turns describing a diagram to their partner, who had to attempt to draw it.  Then, they switched places.  At the end, we talked about difficulties during this activity and how they represent difficulties that we have when talking to others in real life.  I think it worked well to illustrate the point!

After lunch, we began our lesson on Pythagoras.  The class had read about him, and they had a lot to say!  Typically, we only learn about the Pythagorean theorem and his contributions to the field of math.  But, he was a truly interesting character!  The class enjoyed hearing about his more quirky ideas!


Most of this class had not worked with squaring numbers or square roots, but I didn't let that stop us!  I taught them these concepts first, then we applied it to how Pythagoras calculated the hypotenuse of a right triangle.  We worked through a few of these together, and they really got it!  I told them that one day, they will get to this concept in their math lessons and remember that Miss Holly taught them all about it on the farm!  The kids then worked in groups to try to work through the steps that Archimedes used when he tried to come up with the approximation of pi.  They did a really great job with this complicated subject!


The kids turned in their paragraphs for science class, and I will give those back next week.

In grammar, the kids in book 4 reviewed all of the material that was covered in the last few lessons.  They made changes as needed.  The kids in books 5 and 6 reviewed the at-home material, but also learned how to diagram direct objects.  They will be using this knowledge to answer their at-home questions this week.

In literature, the class reviewed their reading comprehension questions.  Although this is a simpler book that they have been used to, it is a great one!  We are using this book to learn figurative language topics.  Today, they learned about similes, personification, onomatopoeia, and hyperbole.  They added flaps to their literature notebooks for each of these.  Then, we looked through the chapters to find examples of each.  They will continue to find examples from the book to add to their notebooks, and we will add some other types of figurative language next week in class.

10/10/19