Weeks in Review: Mars Rover, Free Dancing, and No Cavities!

A smidgen of what we did the past two weeks...

Reading

In My Book House, our readings included  an excerpt from Heidi, three fairy tales -"The Twelve Dancing Princesses," "Snow White and Rose Red," and Perrault's "Cinderella," and a poem by William Blake. I let Gemma choose what story she wants to hear, and clearly, she's on a fairy tale kick.

The book she was reading to me was The Magic Tree House: Tigers at Twilight. She finished last night.

Nature Study/Science

Gemma planted a window garden with bean seeds and carrot seeds.

Here is what it looked like after a week:

We also put together a simple solar-powered Mars rover. It works. It just moves very s...l...o...w...l...y.

She reviewed Classical Conversations' science memory work by categorizing terms.

She played in rain puddles.

Math

I came home from work one day, about a week ago, to find that Gemma had flipped ahead in her Mathematical Reasoning Level C book to a fill-in-the-blank multiplication chart. And she had filled in some of the blanks. Correctly. She'd never seen a multiplication chart, but because of Classical Conversations' skip counting songs, she recognized some of the patterns.

Not only did she write in some of the answers, she also noticed that the squares of the numbers (another Classical Conversations song) are found on a diagonal from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. She also drew a second diagonal line, which didn't yield a pattern she was familiar with (although, if you go from greatest to least, from 25 to 9, the difference of the numbers increases 1, 3, 5, 7 - odd numbers).

Dance

This picture is of Gemma during "free dance."

And here she is practicing a plié.

Dentist

No cavities! I'm so thankful. My insurance covered sealant, so we sealed Gemma's "groovy" teeth.

Spanish

She did a couple of Duolingo lessons, and asked to do some pages in her workbook.

Drawing & Art Appreciation

I taught our home(pre)school co-op a lesson about Van Gogh's Irises, to prepare them for their field trip to the Getty to see the real thing. Instead of painting fields of irises, I had them each paint a single flower. We looked at the shapes and colors of the petals, stem, and leaves.

Can you guess whose child rushed ahead and made her leaves before the teacher gave those instructions?