Friday, August 21, 2015

Schole' in Practice - SGCA Week 2

Week two was full of learning!  We had some crazy science, more poetry, continued lessons in drawing, met our two new Teachers for Latin and Science, learned another ancient Chinese originated game for our Schole' lunch along with listening to our guest play clarinet, saxophone and give a lesson on voice.  Join me as I recap our Schole' Moments from this week...


Morning Time
We are continuing to work on memorizing the Beatitudes and working on our virtue of the week - Love.  Today's story was a continuation of the missionary Festo Kevingere from Africa.


Great Books
Today's Great Books focused on learning Haiku poetry.  They did a variety of activities from counting syllables in words to composing their own Haiku.   They read the following book in class to help the kids further understand the concept of a Haiku:

Fine Arts
The children are continuing to learn more about the elements of drawing, following along line by line as the Academic Mentor leads them through the steps of drawing various objects and then spending some time on art appreciation to conclude the class.

Schole' Lunch
Our guest today, Mary Fuller, brought her many talents as she explained about the orchestra, various instruments and showcased her clarinet, saxophone and voice.  She even taught the kids a quick voice lesson on proper breathing.  She teaches at Carolina School of Music and we were thankful to her for coming to share with us.  The kids then headed outside to learn cats cradle, which is thought to have originated out of ancient China.  They also continued to play Chinese jump rope and become better at this newly learned game from last week.  

Latin
We were happy to welcome our new Latin Academic Mentor!  She did a fantastic job on her first day and the kids all loved her.  They are continuing to grow their Latin vocabulary and learning their noun endings.  I've had a few kids tell me Latin is their favorite subject of the day!  

Science
It was lots of fun to teach this class again this week.  I had our new Academic Mentor there with me, getting a feel for the class and she will be taking over in the coming weeks and will be fabulous!  We started outside today in keeping with Great Book's poetry unit by reading some Science poetry (or better yet, why scientists aren't poets!) called Science Verse.  Next, we read a book about the scientific method called 11 Experiments That Failed -which the kids thoroughly enjoyed, as you can see by the boy's faces above.  
              
Experiment Week
This week was our experiment week (we alternate weeks of nature study with experimentation).  So today, we focused on expanding the ideas of observation and classification from last week's nature walk and then added the concept of hypotheses and predictions.  The kids were given some materials for their Science Notebooks that would help them to remember the steps of the scientific method and prompts for writing them out during experiments.  

We began with what will be a weekly activity for the kids.  They looked at a photograph of an eminent event and then having the students write down one observation (something that is occurring right now), one prediction (something they think will happen as a result) and one inference (what they can reason as a conclusion or moral from the photo).  This is to guide the kids in thinking about things based on evidence and logic.

Then still keeping with Great Book's poetry unit, we read a poem called The Elephant Poem and discussed the skills of observation and why it's important to collaborate in Science. 

Lastly, we did a fun experiment to highlight the scientific method and introduce the idea of variables in Science.  It was called making Elephant Toothpaste - after all we did just read about an Elephant!

It was a Wonderful Schole' day!



2 comments:

  1. Colleen, thank you so very much for capturing these moments for our community! We are blessed to be a part of Sola Gratia and we are excited to come each week to learn and grow in virtue, knowledge and understanding. :-)

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    1. Thank you Susan! It's been such a joy. God has provided in excess of what I could have hoped for with our Community. I'm very thankful. :)

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