I'm blogging my way through our four year curriculum program so I don't forget everything that worked for us! Please feel free to use what works for your family and share in the comments anything you would add. For more on Classically Catholic Memory go here.
Religion
Lesson 1
The kids filled out a Corporal Works of Mercy word jumble while listening to a few Angel Food sermons. Pick your favorites, or listen to both!
- The Three Little Angels (FYI: It's a Halloween story)
- The Shoemaker
Corporal Works of Mercy Charades was super easy and fun. Write the works down on a strip of paper and then let the kids take turns drawing slips and acting them out.
You can also check out what Family Catechism has to offer on this topic, and this would be a great week to go and perform one of the works as a family!
Latin
We are learning the Sanctus by watching and listening to this version on youtube.
History
Lesson 1: Versailles
To teach the kids about Versailles Kevin used a free, and amazing, google tour! You could spend hours getting lost in the chateau without even leaving your home :). Rick Steves also has an awesome audio tour of Versailles that you can download for free. We didn't try it, but you might be able to pull off using the google tour with the audio tour for the full experience.
Kevin and I were extremely blessed to go to France for our 5 year anniversary, so we pulled out our photo book from the trip and shared with them some of our own Versailles photos as well.
P.S. If you ever travel Europe check to see if Rick has free audio tours of where you are headed, it's way cheaper than paying for a tour or renting the audio tour on site. We used them several times during our France trip, it was awesome on so many levels! Just download them to an iPod or similar device and bring your headphones!
Kevin and I were extremely blessed to go to France for our 5 year anniversary, so we pulled out our photo book from the trip and shared with them some of our own Versailles photos as well.
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| A little selfie in the Hall of Mirrors. You can see the headphone cord in Kevin's hands from our listening to Rick Steves tour! |
Lesson 2:
For our second history lesson Bean read Peter the Great. Then we started Christmas break :).
Science
This week's memory work is on the states of matter. There is so much out there for teaching this topic! Separate from the lessons that follow, we also read the books pictured below and watched Bill Nye's Phases of Matter on youtube.
Lesson 1
Here is what you'll need for your first lesson on the states of matter:
To begin we observed the three main states of matter: gas, liquid, and solid. We talked about their properties and what makes them unique. (Better details are in the Teacher Text.)
Next we did an activity that demonstrated how molecules move faster when they gain energy. The food coloring in the hot water spread faster because the molecules have more energy and therefore move faster.
We followed that up with activity 2, which aims to demonstrate a similar principle. Something about mixing dyed hot water with cold clear water and vice versa. It didn't work for us. I say just do activity 1.
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| Womp-Womp-Womp |
Supplies needed:
For starters we blew up a balloon with a bottle of root beer. They suggest cola, but we don't like cola, so I bought root beer. It still worked, so pick your favorite carbonated beverage.
After the balloon was filled up we compared the volume of the bottle that was used to fill the balloon to an unopened bottle and observed that they appeared to still have the same volume. I think the one that blew up the balloon looked like it now had more volume, but I'm no Bill Nye. In the end, what you are observing is that gas molecules are much farther apart from each other than liquid molecules, so there is no observable difference between the two bottles.
Next we observed gas molecules turning back into liquid molecules via sweat on a glass.
And for our last observation we put together this contraption.
It took me several readings to understand what they wanted me to do with a pencil, ruler, cups, etc., I kept picturing the pencil under the cups... anyway, there you have it (look at the picture below). The paper towel labeled A was soaked in rubbing alcohol and one labeled W was soaked in water. The alcohol evaporated faster than the water and...
boom.
Finally, we made our last mini-book for our science lapbook! It came from Discovering Atoms, Molecules, and Matter. We then assembled our folders with all of the inserts we'd been collecting over the semester and called it a day.
Math
Lesson 1
I made these strips of paper for the kids to make a ladder out of the multiples of 9.
Lesson 2
Then I taught them them a finger trick for the multiples of 9. I always found this trick fascinating as a kid!
Timeline
Lesson 1
We played Timeline Hangman this week!
Instead of drawing a blank for each letter of a word, I drew a blank for each word in the card. If a player guessed the beginning letter of a word, then I wrote just that letter in the blank. Above you see "Charlemagne Becomes Holy Roman Emperor". For this to work the kids need to be fairly familiar with the week's cards, so don't play it right after you introduce the new cards. And I'd suggest playing this game during a week when you don't have cards with dates... like week 8 :). Instead use it during week 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 16, or 18.
Lesson 2
And we put pictures into our timeline book this week!
Geography
Since May we have been studying one state per week to go along with our study of North American geography. Here are the states I've blogged about so far. You could pick one thing from each lesson or just do something fun about a few states each week. I'll keep linking to the state studies as we move through our Journey Across America!
Kentucky
Ohio
Michigan
Indiana
Illinois
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Great Words I
It's another quick poem-in-one-week this week! I couldn't find The Elephant by Hilaire Belloc in any picture books, sorry. To bring the fun you can do some fun crafts or activities from this Pinterest board. I particularly like the milk jug elephants!