Catholic Schoolhouse Tour 3: Week 19

Catholic Schoolhouse Tour 3: Week 19

GK Chesterton has plenty of great quotes, here’s one of my favorites for students to hear:

Image result for gk chesterton quotes right is right wrong is wrong

You could start the week off with a discussion about this quote.  Sometimes doing the right thing is really hard if everyone else is doing the wrong thing.


Religion

This week we start learning about Saint Maximilian Kolbe.  Get started in your fun pack!

Saint Maximilian Kolbe Fun Pack


Math:

  • The fourth quarter of Tour 3 focuses on measurement conversions.  These are so useful- especially for the culinary enthusiast in your home!  For this week, pull out your measuring spoons.  Do an easy experiment where you show how 3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon.  Grab a teaspoon and fill it (with water if you want, or rice if you don’t want to get wet).  Pour your teaspoon of water or rice into a tablespoon.  Repeat until you fill your tablespoon.  How many teaspoons did it take?

Language Arts:


Music

  • Listen to the Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Richard Strauss this week (here it is on youtube). Then discuss it! How does it make you feel?  What does it make you think about? What instruments do you hear?
  • Fill out a notebooking page about Richard Strauss.

Music Notebooking Page


Art


Latin

  • Print this week’s Classical Roots flashcards:

Classical Roots Week 19 Cards

  • Make and wear name tags this week with the classical root words.  Have fun making them with scrapbooking or construction paper, or simply write your root word name on a name tag sticker. It’s not exactly grammatically correct, but it’d be a fun way to memorize the roots!

History

  • This week is full of writers! Get ready to do some reading and writing!
  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are some of the most famous mystery stories ever.  Have your students write (or tell) their own mystery stories this week.  There’s a scholastic website on how to write a mystery story; have your older students read it before starting.  They can outline their mystery with the plot, characters, clues, etc. prior to writing the story.  Your younger students can just have fun telling a story where there is some unknown to be discovered at the end (keep in mind it doesn’t HAVE to be a murder story).
  • Read a Sherlock Holmes story this week of the course!  Since these stories are so old, they are in the public domain and you can access them for free on wiki source here.  You can even listen to them read aloud!
  • There are lots of different abridged and adapted versions of Sherlock Holmes stories for kids, check your library for some.  The Illustrated Classics for Kids had a great version, but unfortunately, it’s out of print! If you ever find any books from that series at a garage or rummage sale, grab them!
  • This might be a stretch… but play the board game Clue after you’ve taught about Sherlock Holmes!
  • The invention of the radio is in the timeline this week in 1895, only 122 years ago! People used radios differently in some ways back then than we do today.  Have a discussion about how you use radios in your life (probably to listen to music, news, weather, and traffic updates) and how radios were used in the early 1900s.  People use to gather around the radio to listen to stories, much like we gather around a tv to watch a movie.
  • Have a radio hunt this week- how many radios are in your house? (Don’t forget to check the garage or driveway- there’s probably one in your car/van!)
  • Build a radio– they aren’t as hard as they might seem to build! There are several types out there, but if you want to get something that you can add to later when you teach more about circuits get the Snap Circuit brand. (You can get bigger sets and they’ll all mesh- sort of like buying legos).
  • Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, a collection of stories, which you might be tempted to assign to your students to read.  But just as a fair warning, it’s a bit scary, and I don’t think I’d recommend it as a read-aloud for younger kids or a self-reading assignment for elementary-aged kids.  Instead, just cover the fact that Kipling wrote the Jungle Book and watch the fun Disney version!  It’s not exactly true to the story, but it has the same characters (and some really catchy tunes).
  • Netflix has the new live-action movie, The Jungle Book, available (it just came out last year!).  While the rating is PG, we watched it and found it to be too scary! (my 6-year-old said “this is scary!” and my 3-year-old ran for cover).  Ratings just aren’t what they used to be.  In any case, it’s a little truer to the story, but I wanted to warn you it does have some dark and scary parts which may not be suitable for your smaller students.  I have to say, hearing Christopher Walken play King Louis was by far my favorite part.
  • If you want to just avoid The Jungle Book entirely but still read some Kipling, go with the Just So stories.  They are so fun for kids to read, and can inspire them to write their own stories explaining why something is the way it is.  Check out this collection of Just So stories, on Wikisource (they are all public domain and on Librivox too), and then challenge your students to write their own story.
  • GK Chesterton wrote many great works, some of which were the Father Brown mysteries.  The originals are a great read for the adult, but be sure to get a copy of The Father Brown Readers: Stories from Chesterton for your younger students.  It has adaptations of 4 of the mystery stories along with pictures to keep them interested! I recommend them for your 3rd-5th grade readers.
  • I’ve listed several reading activities for this week since there are three authors in the timeline.  It would be a great week to assign a book project for something your students read.  These are typical assignments in a traditional school and are still valuable to learn how to do.  Some ideas to choose from might be:

Geography

  • Keep going in your Africa lapbook!
  • As you sing the song for this week, point to the countries on your wall map!
  • Have you ever heard of Our Lady of Kibeho?  She’s the only Vatican-approved Marian Apparition in Africa and took place in Rwanda in 1982-1983.  You can read more about her here, and on Wikipedia.

Science

  • The last quarter focuses on Nutrition, and it’s a great time to talk about the type of food you eat and why you eat it.  The memory work this week lists the nutrients our bodies need to function and grow. For your meals this week, discuss what nutrients your food has.  Discuss which meals are more healthy and which are less healthy.  It can be ok to eat chicken nuggets and French fries every once in a while, but why wouldn’t you want to do it every day?
  • Look at the Nutrition labels on some of the food in your pantry and compare them.  Which have more of the nutrients you need, which have less?  Play a game where you choose two items from the pantry. Ask your student which has more (insert nutrient here, for example, iron, or vitamin C, etc), and see if they can guess correctly!  We do this sometimes with cereal in the morning.  You’d be surprised how fortified cereal is with nutrients.  Why do you think that is?
  • Let your students help you make the grocery list this week.  What are you planning to cook, and how good for you will it be?
  • Check out some of these free printables for learning about Nutrition!

Did you miss Tour 3 Week 18? Check it out now!

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