The Rain Is Here!
The rain has arrived and so has the end of the first quarter! Delighted at the progress everyone has made since the beginning of the year, here is a brief update from our recent forays into our studies.
FAITH
MEMORY WORK
We are off and running in memorizing the Orthros Prayers of Psalms 148/149 beautifully. Only two more weeks to go before we are finished and present it in its entirety. Glory be!
ICONS
Every student is working beautifully on his or her icon writing projects. We are almost finished with the transfer, so next week we hope to begin adding color. The kids seem to enjoy the quiet mindfulness of tracing the faces. Along with our studies in light and color, they are learning to really look with care for differences in tones and hues of the original.
FR. MATTHEW and FR. BASIL
For the past couple of weeks we have been learning a lot about St. Gabriel, the Fool for Christ, from Georgia. Not so incidentally, a Grammar 2 student is visiting his hermitage next week! St. Gabriel of Georgia, pray for us!
CATECHISM
This year we are reading through A Children’s Catechism. We are gathering around the story of salvation through the lens of The Good Samaritan. The children are attentive and carefully take in what we learn together. This has prompted some vibrant discussions about our faith. The children have asked serious questions about forgiveness.
THE GOSPEL OF ST. LUKE
We have begun studying the Gospel of St. Luke, and so many of our group have a good grasp on many of the stories and characters in them. This is our Friday joy.
Fr. Matthew shares about the church's pilgrimage to Mt. Athos.
A color wheel and the beginnings of St. Sebastian.
LATIN
We are through nine weeks of Latin study, and thanks to Mrs. Schwartz's teaching last year, the children remember quite a bit of what they have studied. One of our favorite things to do is play a Round the World games for vocabulary and act out commands. Last week, the class had me in stitches. Further, we are incorporating the studies of animals with numbers and colors. Though we do take seriously our studies, we laugh a lot and act out many of the stories. Further, the children learn to pay attention to syntax. And the best question was asked by a student last Tuesday: "Why is it out of order?" In other words, she noticed that Latin sentences often end with verbs. Good noticing!
MATHS
This year, the children have spent a lot of time setting up Jenga tiles to create domino-effects. We have played several games in math in warm-up drills. Greg Tang's work is found online and is an excellent resource. Our "Sophie Time" in math has been a great encouragement. Last week we worked with Tanagrams.
GREEN GROUP is becoming quite adept at adding and subtracting four-digit equations. They have also learned the terms for these two operations and are able to identify he minuend and sum as the greatest number in the equation. This is very helpful when thinking through word problems and using a bar model to solve. Additionally, students are working through two-step problems. For every word problem solved, students cash in on one smartie!
Soon, we begin an immersion to memorize the multiplication and division table through 12s.
PURPLE GROUP is finishing a review on two-digit multiplication and long division. Following, we begin an immersion into fractions!
READING and WRITING
We have wrapped our several stories associated with early American history and are currently finishing up the story, "Shh! We Are Writing the Constitution!" Our next reads will be an adaptation of "King Lear" by Shakespeare; stories on Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark, and "The Tree Wagon, an historical fiction but strongly based on the true story of settlers who emigrated from Iowa and carted wagons and wagons of fruit trees with them to replant right here! Their arbored lineage is found in the Willamette Valley today! Wow!
Students are also composing stories by writing responses to Fables they are learning. This month we have focused on plot development as well as learning to write a summar of a story as well as an amplification. The joy is in watching them stand up on the bench and listen as they share their work. There are giggles and critiques: intended for encouragement.
A student’s name was drawn to re-present a fable for the class.
Glued and engaged!
SPELLING and GRAMMAR
A challenging place of growth for most students is learning how to write clearly. This year we are combining our spelling with grammar lessons by incorporating skills into sentence writing. This has been a solidly consistent area of challenge for our group because it requires precision in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and correct use of English syntax. Most get immediate feedback from me, and there are several erasures on every lesson.
For example, last week the entire class was struggling to write helping verbs and predicate verbs to practice identifying a verb phrase. These are the principle parts that we have honed in on for spelling and will again next week. All the ways a little ole helping verb can indicate both time and mood of a verb is unfolding before them with awe. :)
It is one thing to study these on paper with practice exercises, it is wholly different when they must learn the nuance by writing the sentences on their own. It’s been very beneficial.
Alongside our grammar and spelling work as writing exercises, the children are becoming more proficient at dictation. Our latest entry is "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll. In it, he plays with language in made up words in such a way that we are having fun parsing out the parts of speech and their possible meanings.
HISTORY
We have been up to our boots in colonial history. We have made tricorn hats, allied as either a Loyalist and signed off on the Declaration of Dependence or committed ourselves as a Patriot and signed off on the Declaration of Independence. Students have each made a saltdough map of their chosen colonies, and determined a colonial character to represent them.
Now that the Constitution is being written, some quick elections took place yesterday. The head of the Executive Branch is our newly elected President, but it was a tight race! The Legislative Branch includes our one and only Senator, and the House of Representatives consists of two Representatives. Our Judicial Branch, put forth by the President himself and approved by the Senate, sits on the class bench with three Justices. Meanwhile, we ordinary citizens are proposing laws. Two have passed. Several have been turned away at the Senatorial level, including giving broccoli instead of lollipops at the end of the week for successful Bible memorization.
Our Three-Branch role-playing helps children understand more clearly the language presented in the texts we are reading and gives us a platform to discuss some of the more difficult and nuanced subjects of compromise, conversation, clarity, liberty, and responsibility. Learning how to pronounce executive, legislative, and judicial was a mouthful for most. See if they can say these!
Original Prints from the State House in Pennsylvania
The prints the children are looking at are original to the State House in Pennsylavnia. One shows the ransom of slaves from a slave ship replete with Scriptures. They were quite engaged and noticing details.
1st Thursday of the Month: Oregon ecology in science.
Here, the children learned about and drew the state mammal: the beaver, of course!
LAB PARTNERS IN SCIENCE
Our science lessons have taken us through the study of energy, and now we are learning about the energy of light. We have read some truly beautiful books about light.
Their "focus" has been on learning that light is an electromagnetic wave, identifying the difference between transluscent, transparent, and opaque objects, replicating the color wheel of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, learning how wavelength affects the way we perceive color, and a good discussion on incandescence, bioluminesence, phosphoresence as well as a brief study on light in art. The children loved this. Meanwhile, I am hoping someone composes a piece on the piano that represents the sound and length of the seven colors of the rainbow. We analogized each color on the spectrum with a musical note; red, being the longest, clearly has the whole note. But what does red sound like? There are possibilities here ...
Since we are concluding our first quarter of working with our assigned lab partners, we will choose new ones for next quarter. Why the lollipops? We just finished testing for this week's memory verse ... and that is the sweetness that comes with every week's accomplishment. Broccoli was vetoed, after all.
I look forward to seeing parents for the conferences next week as well as sharing their efforts and my joy to have your children as my students (again) this year!
