assignments for 10/13/09

Good Morning!

We had a busy Tuesday! Many thanks to Mrs. Victoria, Spencer's mom, for assisting us yesterday. Thanks to Amelia, also, for the cookie snack!

We had some great discussion during Bible time and had fun acting out the confusion that must have occurred at the tower of Babel when their languages were changed. We were treated to a performance over in the choir suite by some actors representing slaves. Mrs. Fowler arranged this and it was moving. They taught us some Negro Spirituals and taught us about Praise Houses and the codes hidden in the spirituals they sang.

We spent time rolling the dice and reviewing our memory work. We are not doing as well lately. Be sure to work on the week assigned at home. We seem better at the older ones than with the more recent ones. I still have a hope that we can present the Veritas cards memory work to the whole school at some future point. Perhaps the history sentences as well.

For literature we talked about how much of what Robert E. Lee was taught by his mother came straight from scripture. We discussed how we can deny self and consider one another more highly than we do ourselves. Not easy at any age, but especially hard for children. We asked God to help us to do so this week. We also tasted some boiled meat and potatoes as was served at West Point while Lee was there. I did not have any soup with cockroaches or bread pudding with mice!

In lit we started a project of making a large map of the south--we are going to mount it on a board and make small figures from clay to go on it. We will locate the major battles of the war. Hopefully it will be ready to show at our meeting next week. We spent a great deal of time on Latin. I plan to devise a new way to write the words and meanings because the children are frustrated. It may be as simple as a bigger piece of paper. There was alot of info in this lesson and I will probably review some of it before moving on to the next one.

We did not get to our maps due to the length of the slave presentation. I will double up our time with them next week.

Please don't forget our 3:00 meeting next time. If you can't make it, I will be sure you get a good summary of what we discussed. Enjoy teaching your children this week!

love,
Mrs. Tkach

ASSIGNMENTS:
1. Read ch. 13 in the Bible Story Book.
2. Practice memorizing Week 6 memory work. Reminder: I do not cover Latin or English in class.
3. Finish reading the Lee book.
4. The schedule I was given for SOTW calls for us to press onto chapter 6. However, I am going to wait and spend another week on the Civil War. We'll omit or touch lightly on a future chapter.
Any reading or research you do with your child on the Civil War would be great. I'll ask them about it next time.
5. Discuss the derivatives I gave you in class during Latin. Complete the sections we did not do in class. Don't forget the optional worksheets you have in the back of your book.