Catholic Schoolhouse Tour 3: Week 5
You could print this meme for those times when your students aren’t quite living up to your expectations.
.
Religion
Keep going in your Saint Francis Xavier Fun Pack!
- This week’s Religion memory work is the fourth commandment: Honor your father and mother. I love this now that I’m a mom, haha! Have a discussion with your students about what it means to honor your father and mother. Make a list of actions on your whiteboard that your students typically do (both good and bad ones). Then have them cross off any that don’t honor their father or mother. Some ideas to fill that board may be: Cleaning up my room, telling lies, fighting with my brother, doing chores to the best of my abilities, being patient with my younger siblings, giving Daddy hugs when he gets home from work, doing my school work with a good attitude… etc. Add some that may be specific to your family!
- Add the next flag to your Ten Commandments!
10 Commandments Garland 4th Commandment
Math
- Skip counting by 10s and 11s is this week’s math focus.
- I’ve always thought skip counting by 10s was the easiest, and there are plenty of things to skip count by 10’s. Skip count dimes, crab legs, fingers or toes… go bowling and skip count the pins at the ends of the allies!
- Skip count your family’s fingers (or all the students’ fingers in your program meet-up) by 10’s. You could make a game of it by lining up 13 students. Have everyone hold their 10 fingers out in front, and one student will run down the line skip counting by 10s. When he/she gets to the end they stop and hold out their fingers. The next student in line runs and skip counts the fingers. Keep going until everyone’s had a chance to skip count!
Language Arts
- Here’s another game idea for learning/practicing verbs. Write down several different places/locations and drop them into a hat. It can be anywhere: house, store, zoo, playground, park, woods, etc. Draw a place from your hat and set a timer (longer for younger kids shorter for older kids), and have all your students write down as many verbs for that place as they can think of. When the time is up, score it like boggle. Any verbs that more than 1 person has, get crossed off the list. Verbs that are unique each get 1 pt. This game will get them thinking of some interesting verbs! For example, if ‘grocery store’ was drawn, verbs written down might be: walk, shop, buy, weigh, smell, read, add, subtract, talk, etc. As long as your student can defend his/her answer then it’s fair. You could have a vote for the really out there answers. (You might roll a shopping cart, but it’d be difficult to fly in a grocery store)
- A great idea that one of our CSH programs is using is to play Verb Charades! Have your students write down verbs on notecards or slips of paper. Place them in a bowl or hat, and take turns drawing a slip and acting out the verb.
- Exercise your student’s brains by asking them to list all the verbs they have done today! (Some ideas, might be: brushed teeth, dressed, tied shoes, ate breakfast, etc.) Then make a list of all the verbs they hope to do during the rest of the day. (Maybe play outside, color a picture, eat ice cream, etc.)
- Now write all the verbs your pet dog/cat/fish can do. I bet (and hope!) some are different from what your students do.
- Don’t forget, to practice finding any of the parts of speech, you can pull out an old newspaper, some highlighters and send your students hunting. Create competitions to find the most, or as many different ones as possible, or in the case of verbs different tense ones. Ask your older students if it is more common to find past, present, or future tense verbs.
Music
- A quote by George Frederic Handel is “I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wish to make them better.” Write this up on your board and discuss it this week. What role does music play in your life and family? Where do we encounter music? (More places than you think- in the car, at mass, grocery and shopping stores, backgrounds of commercials even!) Think about the music you typically listen to and then think about or listen to the Messiah. How is what Handel created different?
- Check out this coloring page for George Frederic Handel. Learn more about his life and music.
Art
- I’ve found a cool website with a couple of Albrecht Durer Coloring pages. You can either print it out and color it, or color it online. Here’s his self portrait coloring page, and here is his Young Hare coloring page.
- Those coloring pages could be a great distraction for your younger students while you do a Charlotte Mason Picture study (here’s a great post from Real Life at Home) with your older students.
Latin
- Flash cards for this week’s classical roots
Latin Roots Flash Cards Week 5
History
- Nicolaus Copernicus taught the revolutionary idea that the earth went around the sun, instead of the sun around the earth! Learn some new vocabulary words when you learn about him: geocentric (earth-centered) and heliocentric (sun-centered). Talk about how it might be easy to make this mistake. People back then didn’t have spaceships taking pictures from space. After all, it was only just proven that the Earth was round! Your discussion can be about how things aren’t always as they appear.
- Create this heliocentric/ geocentric craft this week with some cardstock, scissors, coloring pencils, and 2 metal brads. First print, color, and cut out. Then attach the pieces using metal brads. First, place the earth in the center of the orbit page. Rotate the Sun around the earth along the dotted line orbit. Talk about how this is what the people of the 14 and 1500s thought was happening. Then switch to heliocentric, with the sun secured in the middle and the Earth revolving around the sun. This is geocentric, and how the solar system actually works.
Heliocentric vs Geocentric Printable
- Show and tell your Catechism this week when you teach about the Council of Trent. Many students maybe have not used a full catechism, maybe they have a child’s one or the St. Joseph Catechism. It helps to show that the same material they learn in CCD, religious ed classes, or at home is the same material we believe as adults. It never goes away or becomes obsolete. The Catechism is such a wonderful resource, almost any question you have about the Catholic faith is answered in it with references to scripture and church doctor documents.
- To tie a bunch of this week together into one package, look up the 10 Commandments in the Catechism (CCC 2052-2074). It might be a bit much for your younger students, but you can choose some parts to read aloud to your students like 2056. You have 1.) The Catechism which was a result of the Council of Trent, 2.)10 Commandments in Religion this quarter, and it talks about the Decalogue which means 10 words (skip counting?).
- For teaching about Ivan the Terrible check out this short documentary on youtube. It’s a little over 2 minutes but gives a great and short bio of Ivan the Terrible while showing many pieces of art depicting the Tsar.
- Ivan the Terrible commissioned the building of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, probably one of the most recognized Russian buildings. Here’s an easy coloring page of Saint Basil’s Cathedral for your little ones, and a more detailed one for your older students to color.
Geography
- Keep going in your Oceania Lapbook! Add some features this week.
- Check out some nice video images of the Great Barrier Reef with this 4 minute video on National Geographic.
- Here is a short video about the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench on National Geographic.
- Create a marine biome (yea, science plus geography) showing a coral reef in a shoe box. You could cut out images from a magazine if you have some, or you could print the plants and animals from this diorama guide.
- So this is a stretch, but if your students will be watching tv this week anyway (maybe you need a break?), you might as well show Finding Nemo. It features clown fish who live in an anemone in the Great Barrier Reef, and search all over the waters near Australia to find Nemo. I’m not saying it’s meant to be educational, but hey it goes with the geography theme this week and it does have a lot of information about coral reef and the animals that live there. 🙂 Make it educational by asking some questions at the end.
- Most homeschoolers have both a globe and a wall map of the world. When you teach about georgrapher Gerardus Mercator, put them side by side (or close enough for kids to see both easily). Compare them, especially the land up north and the land near the south. How are they different? To take something spherical and make it ‘flat’ takes some distortion. Gerardus Mercator created the system we learned about in Week 2 of Line of Latitude and Lines of Longitude to help make sense of the sphere turned flat map.
- Sometimes you can find inflatable globes at discount stores, or you can order a pile of them at once online. If you don’t mind destroying something for the sake of education, take an inflatable globe and cut it into quarters carefully. Glue the pieces to a foam board or cardboard to show what a sphere might look like when made flat. See if you can still line up some of the Lines of latitude as you lay out the pieces.
- If you don’t have an inflatable globe, you can easily imitate this activity with an orange. Draw a world map as best you can on an orange (just get the basics, like the continents, equator, and a few lines of latitude). Cut the orange into quarters and peel the skin off. Then lay the pieces as flat as you can.
Science
- There are several episodes of Magic School Bus that fit into this week’s study of biomes. If you have Netflix, you can watch Season 1 Episode 7 “All dried up” (about deserts), Season 3 Episode 7 “Into the Rainforest,” and Season 4 Episode 5 “Gets Swamped.”
- Check out this website with lots of information about different biomes!
- Give each student a different biome to research. For your little students, have them draw a picture of a biome of their choice, including clues about its climate, and the animals and plants that live there. For your older students have them illustrate but also write several facts about the biome including it’s climate, average temperatures, animals, plants, and where it’s found on earth (maybe even a map showing the areas where the biome exists). Give them access to an encyclopedia or atlas to find the information. Or consider doing the project at the library, where they can ask the librarian for help finding books to help them.
Did you miss Tour 3 Week 4? Check it out.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.