Simple Machines Week Two

A warm welcome to our newest homeschool co-op student! Some notes from the classroom this past week:

Middle School Math Assessments

getting into Daily Routines including

Class Job Chart
writing in our plan books and color coding our subject areas
learning where things are stored
Morning Pages daily creative writing time
water and stretch breaks (10 minutes at the top of every hour)

Skill Cards

Bringing Materials to Class
Following Instructions
Contributing to Discussions

Virtue of the Week: Caring

Bus Ride by Nancy Jewell
Everyone is Good for Something by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers
Do You Know What I'll Do? by Charlotte Zolotow

Lessons on Montessori materials including the Waseca Biomes Parts of the Biome Jars, dynamic multiplication with the Checker Board, dynamic addition and subtraction with the Stamp Game, identifying fractions and adding and subtracting fractions and mixed numbers with the Cut-Out Labeled Fraction Circles, practicing compound words and prefixes with the Word Study material, symbolizing sentences with the Grammar Symbols, and learning the locations of the 50 states with the United States Location Color Set

Independent Work Choices including making a personal set of flash cards up to 15 x 15, rolling 10 sided dice to create your own math problems, and using the Washington School Rock Collection to identify the 40 specimens of rocks & minerals in the Washington Student Rock Pack

introduction of some Educational Games including The Grammar Game, Battleship (math - coordinate graphing), and Wildcraft! An Herbal Adventure Game (science - medicinal plants)

continuing with the Literature Group for Bridge to Terabithia

choosing Chapter Books for independent reading time including Esperanza Rising, Three Tales of My Father's Dragon, Danny the Champion of the World, and Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

enjoying Farm Day!

homework for the older children including practicing operations with fractions in Goblin Goulash, a nonfiction reading passage on Ecology, and Multiplying and Dividing Integers

Art including a pulled string activity (for fun) and rubber band snap art (for potential and kinetic energy)

And, last but not least,

Physics notes including the Hovercraft, the 3 Hole Bottle Inquiry Experiment, Newton's cradle, an egg toss in the yard (learning about momentum and impulse and "big t = little F"), our awesome EGG DROP off the roof of my house (two contraptions kept the egg safe and two contraptions did not), the biography of Galileo from Mathematicians Are People, Too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians, kinetic energy vs. potential energy (the archery they've been doing at the Farm helps with this concept), the also-awesome LEVER set up on my front walkway ($7 well spent on a 2x8x8 from Lowe's, because they were thrilled to discover that one child can lift all the other children in our class and me), learning the two definitions of Work, (Work = mass * gravity * height) and also (Work = force * distance), unpacking the big box which arrived from Nova Natural with the Cable Car Kit and the Block and Tackle and looking forward to Pulleys next week!

This post contains affiliate links to the materials I actually use for homeschooling. I hope you find them helpful. Thank you for your support!