We just finished studying the Aztecs. Wes chose a golden temple for his clay dwelling project.
Well, we are three weeks away from the end of our first quarter. It's kind of wild to think of most of the school children being on their 3rd day of the year. I have to say, I love this year round schedule our school district follows. Those long breaks between quarters go a long way to keep your brain fresh and to fend off scholastic burn out!
In the way of an update:
Math - We just completed a section on division finishing up with long division with double digit divisors and remainders; the works. I think we are both glad to be moving on. LOL! Long division is not one of Wes's favorite things. Now we are entering a unit on averaging so we haven't completely escaped division. Next we will be headed for geometry. Yea!
History - We are working our way through the list of cultures that the fourth graders are slated to study. We just started with the Sinagua of Northern AZ and still have the Patayan, Salado, Inca, and Maya to go. Needless to say, we only have enough time to get a small sense of the life these people led. We are keeping a time line as we go in addition to our clay dwellings. We are also making a poster page of each group on which we write all the interesting tidbits we can find. We will also take at least one more field trip to the Basha Museum of Native American Arts (I'm not sure if that is the actual name). At some point this year I would also like to go to the Heard Museum.
Vocabulary - We are currently studying prefixes. Wes is a happy camper this week because the prefixes are uni-, bi-, and tri- which are already familiar to him. Who doesn't like an easy week?
Science - We've been studying the environment and the earth's processes. Tomorrow we'll look at floods. We have also been saving recyclables for art projects.
Religion - Currently studying Judaism
Reading and Language Arts - Just finished up our section n fables although we will still read a few more tales of Native American Folklore. This week we made cards for the Grandparents as this Sunday is Grandparents Day. I don't even know if the Grandparents know about Grandparents Day, but they are about to find out! Fluency is still going really well. It's become a nice part of the morning routine and practically runs itself. We started a new work of fiction this week and are enjoying the story so far. We need to get a little more into the book before we can really start to discuss some of the literary elements. Of the literary elements that 4th graders are meant to learn, we've covered over half already. Now it's just a matter of reinforcing the concepts in the work we do.
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