Letting Her Light Shine: Weekly Wrap-Up for 8/20 (a little late)

Whew! I'm behind again. Our weeks are going fast and our weekends even faster, it seems.

Week of August 20th:

Fine Arts (FA): We are currently studying the life and music of Tchaikovsky in our music and art lessons. She has selected The Nutcracker Suite as her daily listening piece. At the end of our study, she will be presenting this piece in some creative way (song, dance, art, who knows!) Pieces heard this week include: Concerto No. 2, Swan Lake excerpts, and Festival.

LA: We spent a lot of this week working on a lesson in the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum (OYAN). As adventure is not her typical reading genre choice, she was stumped on developing her story, so we spent a great deal of time reading adventure novels and compiling lists of common elements, themes, etc. She was also tasked with brainstorming 4 COMPLETE ideas for her own use. I'm thrilled to say we seem to have jumped this hurdle and are moving on to the next lesson, though we will be reading at least one new adventure novel per week, to keep expanding knowledge of the genre.

Math: She is continuing to work through the ck-12 book, doing about a chapter per day with a quiz each Friday.

SS: We are studying the colonization of America. Though we've touched on all 13 colonies through our text and geography lessons, so far we'd done most of our studying on Jamestown. This week we branched out to the Plymouth colony and the "Pilgrims". We've done lots of reading of non-fiction and historical fiction books (she prefers the historical fiction recounts like "Dear America: Remember Patience Whipple" :) ) and watched a number of documentaries related to the time period. Plimoth.org has a wealth of information! Goals of the week's lessons were to: Locate Plymouth, MA, the Hudson River, Cape Cod, Holland, and England on a map; identify the reasons the Pilgrims came to the New World; explain how Pilgrims landed in the "wrong" place; what year the Massachusetts colony was established; describe the first winter that the Pilgrims spent in Plymouth; study the relationships of the colonists with the Native Americans; discover the myths surrounding the Pilgrims; and compare how the Pilgrims lived with how we lived. We finished the week off with a combined SS and Life Skills lesson. She had to research the foods available to the Pilgrims during their first harvest celebration, plan a menu based on that, locate recipes, compile a shopping list, budget for her items, procure them, create a cooking plan, and implement it. This was a very long day, but the results were fantastic! During dinner, she also recapped to the rest of us everything she had learned about the colony during the week.