Catholic Schoolhouse Tour 1: Week 24

The last post of Tour 1 is here!  I hope you have really enjoyed using Catholic Schoolhouse this year.  It certainly has been fun sharing ideas with you all on the blog, and I hope the free printables, ideas, and books came in handy.  Thanks for a great year!

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Religion

• Print out the fun pack for your State’s Saint and fill out the activities for this week!

State Patron Saint Fun Pack Printable

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Math

• Six hundred forty acres equals one square mile.  That can be difficult to envision for anyone.  If there is a football field you can visit, you can actually see an acre’s worth of area there.  One acre on a football field is 90.75  yards long by 53.33 yards wide (the width of a normal football field). Ok, what that means is when you get there, put two kids on the 0-yard line at one end, and two kids on the 10-yard line at the other end.  They’ve just marked the corners of an acre.  Ask them if they think they could plow all of that in one day with one ox!  (Here’s a picture if that was confusing- the blue dots are your kids, and an acre is shaded in red)
• You could try to make this trip count for PE for the week too- make them ‘plow’ the acre by doing the wheelbarrow (one person holds the other person’s feet, while the other person walks with their arms).  See if they can wheelbarrow the whole acre making rows every 2 or 3 yards apart.

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Language Arts

• The best way to practice letter writing is to write letters!  Have students write letters to their grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents, etc.  Complete the lesson by showing them how to properly address the envelope, add a return address, and stamp it!
• If you have a history museum nearby, they almost always have some historical letters on display somewhere, be it from a soldier writing home from war, a person on the Titanic, etc. I know I always see at least one letter on display in history museums.  There are even a few in science museums. Take a field trip to find letters in your local museum.  Take a picture of it, print it out, and have your students label the printed picture of the letter with Heading, Body, and Closing.

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Music

•  Spend the last week reviewing all the music this year! Play some Bach, Beethoven, Sousa, and Joplin.  Which composer was your favorite and why? Which artists would you like to hear their music live?

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History/ Geography

• If you have a large parking pad or concrete pad, grab your sidewalk chalk.  Have your teacher/tutor draw a big outline of your state, then assign each student a different aspect of the state to add to your giant map.  One student can have cities, rivers, lakes, mountains, and counties.
• Pick a famous person from your state and give a presentation or write a report about them.
• Write a letter to your state representative, learn about your state government
• Visit your state capitol.
• There are a ton of great ideas on the internet for learning about your own state.  Instead of reinventing the wheel… er..  I mean state teaching resources, here’s some link-up of great material I’ve found:
• Crayola Coloring Pages – there’s one for each state
• 123Homeschool4Me – US State Printables, they’re like worksheets
• Make a state float– This one is for Oregon, but I really like this idea.  Print pictures of your state’s resources, high and low temperatures, crops, industries, flag, bird, etc… and glue them onto a box.
• The History Channel has a picture and information about each state at this site. (I haven’t watched all the videos at the top, just scroll down to click on the states.)
• Don’t feel like you have to do all of these or even one of them- they’re just ideas to make your homeschooling more fun this last week.  There are tons of possibilities for studying your own state- pick something that would be the best fit for your family!

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Science

• If you don’t feel like making your own material to teach this week, try out this Powerpoint presentation about Energy from BlackRockSolar.org.  It covers all the ways to generate electricity listed in your Tour Guide, and has lots of neat pictures and graphs!

• Brainstorm which sort of electricity generation would be ideal for your area.  Do you live near a river with a good current? Maybe Hydropower could be used.  Is it really windy where you live? Ask your students to think about which renewable source would work best in your area and why. Then look at a map of the US and discuss some general trends around the US when it comes to energy production.

Thanks for reading!

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Did you miss week 23? Check it out here!Sav