Tuesday's Events and Assignments for 9/22/09

Good Morning!

We had a great day learning yesterday. We talked about God's Word and the stories of creation. Anyone answering questions correctly were treated to giant "Smarties". We enjoyed brownies from Spencer as we celebrated his birthday. Mrs. Hatchell was our helper and worked very hard. Thank you!

We began our latin books and I'm excited about this curriculum. I know that I'm learning from how the material is presented and I hope our students will as well. We had a little difficulty getting the DVD player and TV situated but should have those bugs worked out for next week.

We talked about showing respect to St. Helena for allowing Trinity to operate in their building. I saw great improvement in our hall behavior and I'm very proud of the students for that.

The children are still astounding me with their memory work. Everyone's favorite is the Veritas Cards. I enjoy those as well. We launched into our Abe Lincoln book and I find that overall we are disappointed in the choice. I take full responsibility because I chose the book and fought to keep it on our list. Hopefully the children will be a bit more interested after yesterday's activities and discussion. Even if it's not one of our favortites, I know the students will benefit from being exposed to this work of literature. In conjunction with the book, we were each put in stocks for various crimes. Many thanks to my husband for constructing them for us. We also sat and listened to the water at the courtyard fountain and relaxed and thought of young Abe's mom doing so with him when he was a baby. Lastly, we practiced running backwards to throw off any Indians that might pursue us.

In history, we discussed David Livingstone and looked at some pictures of him and his family. We then proceeded to act out the difficulties of traveling the rivers of Africa with our treasured animals to be dropped off at various ports. Ask your student what we used for a 'boat' and what we said was the waterfall we had to get past. It was a fun activity. We also had a painting activity to represent how Afghanistan was a buffer between Russia and India. Ask your child about that as well.

For a science activity, we saw a drop of water and how it acts as a magnifier.

I'm still working on geography because I want to take that subject well past just memorizing the states and capitals. Mrs. Hatchell has located a blank map of the U.S. that is 17" by 22". We could laminate it and use wipe-off markers so that we could use it all year. The goal I'm reaching for is for the students to be able to draw the US map and label the states with capitals. The cost for the map is $6.95 and I think Staples would charge $3 or so to laminate them. Please e-mail me your thoughts on this additional expense. Here is the web site: http://www.geomatters.com/search/results.asp?S=blank+US+map. I would like each student to have their own.

Please be sure your student brings their latin book and the literature book we're studying to each class.

I hope you each have a great week with your children--I'm enjoying my time with them very much!

Until Tuesday. . .

love,
Mrs. Tkach

ASSIGNMENTS:
1. Read Chapter 4 in SOTW. I will no longer be doing maps from SOTW in class. If anyone does not have the activity book and wants copies with directions to complete this activity at home, please let me know.
2. Work on Week 3 memory work. Reminder: On youtube there is a video of the Classical Conversations group in Lake Norman and their hand motions. These are the ones I use in class with your children.
3. Read through chapter 19 in Abe Lincoln Grows Up. Optional: Read through the Wilderness Road hand out. It was referenced in our book. Also, you might enjoy laughing at the lingo matching activity we did in class
4. Read lesson 7 in our Bible Story book.
5. For Latin, complete all parts of Lesson One--exercises A,B,C,D, and E. Usually we will complete A in class but because of equipment difficulties we were unable to do so. Here are the derivatives for the students to fill in (we discussed these in class)
1. Puerile
2. Puerile
3. Liberty ("liberi" is related to the Latin word for "free")
4. Salvation, Salve
5. Value
6. Amateur, amiable
They do not need to list derivatives for numbers 7 through 10.
Also for Latin, they brought home a sheet we worked on in class. We wrote each vocabulary word and its meaning three times. If they did not finish, they should do so at home. We'll do this every week.