Week 1 Wrap-Up

Our school year is off to a good start.  We're beginning the first month with a little different format in order to take advantage of current events.  We are doing a unit study (learning is focused around a central theme, with core subjects relating to the topic) on the Olympics.  The majority of work in our subjects this first week focused on Ancient Greece and the history of the Olympic games.  Some of the things we've done:

--Watched a video of the Olympic Rings on the River
--studied the history of the games, types of events held, famous ancient Olympians (Kyniska of Sparta??) and the geography of Greece
--identified the flags of Greece and the current host country
--learned a bit about previous London games
--studied famous Olympians (Jim Thorpe, Karoly Takacs, Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph)
--studied archery, badminton, football (soccer), basketball, volleyball, table tennis, shooting, Judo
--worked on Greek root words for vocabulary development (hydro, auto, path, photo, scop, meter, hyper...)
--read several books on the games and learned a little about countries and medals

On Friday, we watched the Olympic opening ceremonies and put all of our new knowledge to use!  Everyone agreed it was very cool!

In addition to the Olympics 2012 unit study, we are also working on reading, math review and grammar.

Over the weekend, we had the opportunity to attend the Lantern Festival at the Missouri Botanical Gardens.  We also took the Journey to the Top of the Gateway Arch and visited the Museum of Westward Expansion.   Both were terrific learning opportunities.  We will wrap up that visit with a PowerPoint presentation.  Attached are just a few pictures from the experience :)