So our past week  started off with the most beautiful Feast day of All Saints.  Our girls sang in two separate masses selections of  Schubert’s Mass in G.  It was glorious and what a wonderful thing to be a part of with the adult choir, a string quartet, and amazing opera soloists.  What a lovely way to begin the week.

Kindergarten – We did quite a few things leading up to All Saints Day and now we have had a wonderful time celebrating All Souls Day and getting ready for Martinmas.  Our circle is now a woodland themed circle with little autumnal animals and the wind playing a major role.  We are baking, painting and modeling.  We have made pumpkin pie salt dough,cookies, taken nature walks and worked on lanterns. Our story is the story of a little shepherd and his sheep. 

Fifth Grade –  We have been putting together our Main Lesson book with a wet on wet painting of the Indus River Valley and a summary of the vast land of India from when we started India.  We also learned a version of a  Hindu Creation Story and created a wet on dry painting for this story, which took us several attempts to really get it look good.  We looked at the story of Brahma and made a mask with Brahma’s four heads. Then we moved on to the  story of Lord Vishnu and how he married Goddess Lakshmi.  We have a painting started for this but I am not certain we will finish it.  The paintings seem to take us a long time.  We also heard the story of King Sangara and his sons and Shiva and how the Ganges came to earth just to hear more stories!

We were fortunate enough to have a Diwali event at our local library in the middle of the week, so I told the story of Rama and Sita before we went.  There were three kinds of crafts to make, Indian food, and wonderful bharatanatyam dance and singing.  It was fun to be part of community festival that tied in with our block. 

For the last part of the week,  we moved from our Creation story into the story of Manu and the Flood and created an oil pastel picture and summary for this story.  We talked about the sacredness of the cow and I told a story about that and we modeled the Brahman cow out of plasticine.   To end the week, we briefly talked about the caste system and how it sprang from Brahma and we started reading about the Sons of Pandu from the Mahabharata.  I hope to end with this story and some spice painting and Indian cooking next week.  We need to keep moving on, because we have been very slow this year!

We are still reading “The Iron Ring” and working on measurement, fractions, multiplication tables, and other math topics.  We are also still working on spelling.  Music is currently working toward Advent and Christmastide music, and also music for our church’s spring musical – already!

Eighth Grade –  We finished up the Civil War through the biography of Sherman and the march to the sea through our state.  I had a book that was a diary of a Confederate girl living in Atlanta at the time of Sherman’s March and that was a good tie-in.  We had also been in the past to a historic site regarding the burning down of a textile mill near us and learned about what happened to all the workers, so that was easy to recall as well to tie in with Sherman. 

Then we moved into the details of Reconstruction and how new challenges arose.  We compared and contrasted Booker T. Washington and WEB DuBois, and tied this into our regional history by talking about the rise of historical black colleges in our state.  I am planting seeds for when we do our Peacemakers block in the spring when we will talk extensively about Civil Rights and the great figures of the Civil Rights Movement, many from our own region.  The last bits of American history we did included Little Big Horn, including a pencil drawing of Little Big Horn, and we talked about the Plains Indians Wars.  We ended on the Transcontinental Railroad and the immigration of the Chinese to California and the role of Chinese workers in building this railroad.

We have two field trips left that I would like to do sometime this year to tie in with this block, and then I will be satisfied.  There are also two badges through the National Park Service that were helpful to do in this block:  the Civil War Junior Ranger Badge, and the “Discovering the Underground Railroad” Badge.  Our daughter is still finishing up a book about Harriet Tubman.

We moved into Organic Chemistry at the very end of the week and really only got as far as discussing the different types of  taste, the function of taste buds, and moved into carbohydrates – monosaccharides, disaccharides,polysaccharides.  We are drawing from the book, “What Einstein Told His Cook” and I hope to move a bit faster next week with Chemistry, although we have several field trips planned.  Thanksgiving is drawing near, and I would love to get this block finished before that if possible.

In our year-long course of Geography, we finally, finally finished up a Main Lesson book page for the United States and the paper on Hurricane Katrina:  Ten Years Later. That was a great project to talk about how to gather resources, how to take notes from resources, then how to use those notes to put the paper together and how to provide references. 

Typing, High School Spanish with a big mid-semester project in Power Point was also due last week for an outside teacher,  and Math (Mainly review of fractions) rounded out the week.  It was busy!  Our older daughter is also involved in all the choir things going on as well, and in Cotton Boll and Consumer Judging for 4-H.  Whew!

Would love to hear what you worked on last week or what you are working on this week!

Blessings and love,
Carrie