Fourth Grade Week 14

This week went much better than the past few weeks.  Caleb seemed to be having fun, and that’s important to me. 
Bible – Our questions this week were ‘Why did God let Adam name the animals?  Why didn’t He name them himself?’ and ‘Did Adam give each of the animals the names we call them today?’  We read Genesis 2:18-25 to answer the first questions and Genesis 2:20 and 11:7-9 to answer the second one.
Math – This week Caleb worked on teaspoon and tablespoon, changing yards to feet, counting by seven, what is a decimal, and measuring capacity.  I added in some fun math activities this week (which will continue from here on out), and this week we played a multiplication dice game.  Caleb did really well, and he had lots of fun.  It worked on multiplication AND addition. 
English – This was our first week stepping away from a formal English curriculum/plan.  It went really well, and I think Caleb enjoyed it.  He worked on sentence classification using a card matching game I created, and he worked on noun attributes with another card matching game.  He watched a Nouns DVD that we borrowed from the library.  He also played several English grammar games on the computer (click on the title to be taken to the site)…

• The Sentence
• Sentence Clubhouse
• Sentence Garden
• Noun Dunk

Sentence Classification Card Matching Game

Noun Attributes Card Matching Game

Classical Conversations Foundations – Here’s what we learned and studied this week…

• English – prepositions ‘down, during, except, for, from’
• Science – the major groups of vertebrates
• History – the fall of Rome
• Math – counting by 11s and 12s
• Latin – 2nd Declension Noun Endings Singular and Plural
• Geography – the Roman Empire…Spain, Gaul/France, Germania/Germany, Alexandria, Carthage
• Timeline – India’s Mauryan Empire, Mayans of Mesoamerica, Punic Wars, Rome Conquers Greece, Roman Dictator Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus and the Pax Romana, John the Baptist
• Science Experiment – this week we had two experiments.  The first one focused on fooling your tongue.  We bit an apple, and then we took another bite while holding a q-tip dipped in vanilla abstract up to our nose.  We had to determine if the second bite tasted any different than the first.  The second experiment was called trickery.  We drew two parallel 4 inch lines.  We put arrows pointing inward on one and arrows pointing outward on the second.  We had to determine which one appeared longer or if they looked the same.
• Art – This was our final drawing project.  The students had to implement OiLS and the other concepts into one last project.

Classical Conversations Essentials – All we did with Essentials this week was our writing assignment and the Analytical Task Sheet (which is probably what we’ll do from here on out).

Arts & Crafts – Caleb chose to make a sock puppet project based on the sock puppet from the Little Big Planet game.  Micah, of course, wanted to join in, too.

Caleb’s ‘sock puppet’

Micah’s ‘sock puppet’

Exploration – Caleb chose to learn more about vertebrates this week.  He read some books from the library, and I had him separate a set of laminated vertebrate cards into each category (fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds).

I’m looking forward to continuing with this new approach to our schooling, and I’m praying that it truly is a good fit for Caleb.  Since he had fun, I’m thinking it is.