Unit 30&31: Preparing

I'm falling really behind on my posts! This time of year it gets harder to keep up. I decided to combine the last two weeks of school into one post. We are so ready to be done with school this year. Sis has three weeks left of the 4th grade and then we are taking a mini-vacation and a long summer break! By this time of the year I always start to feel the burn out and the longing for summer gets really bad! We ended up skipping our art history projects these past 2 weeks and are mostly just trying to get the basics finished up. We also celebrated Sis' 10th birthday!!!

History: These past two weeks we covered the age of Elizabeth, the thirty years war, and the American revolution. We learned about a lot of people some of them include Bloody Mary, Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare, King James, Peter the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Sis wrote a short narration on the American Revolution. This year all of the narrations are just on notebook paper. Next year the narrations will get longer and there is an actual journal for her entries. Sis has great print handwriting, but she still needs some work on her cursive. For some reason when she's writing cursive she doesn't capitalize words, it drives me nuts! Maybe that's something we can work on over the summer.

This is Sis looking up Russia while learning about Peter the Great.

For her research Sis looked up renaissance jewelry like that worn by Queen Elizabeth. The jewelry was pretty extravagant as seen in this picture! On week two she researched engraving, the method used to make pictures during the French and American revolutions. We were suppose to do art projects for both of these but we skipped the jewelry and engraving. I plan on doing the project for next week though.

We're also still reading "The Wonderful Winter," for history and for fun we're still reading through the Viking Quest series together.

Math: In math Sis worked on reading Roman numerals this week like CCXXXIIX= 238 and also converting Arabic numbers into roman numerals. She's also still learning to find fractions of a number like 2/5 of 45=18. In 2 weeks she will take her final unit test over everything and will finally be done with math for the school year!!!Yay!

Science: Science was the one subject where we kept up with our projects and activities these past two weeks. We finished up our unit on the brain. We still have a large section of our text book left. I'm trying to decide what to do, but I'm thinking we will probably skip a couple units and finish up the year with the ones that sound most interesting since there won't be time to complete the whole book.  This week Sis made a model of one hemisphere of the brain and the different parts. 

She also labeled the parts in her journal and learned what each one does. 

This was a project where she had to draw a bunch of dots on a paper and then try to connect every dot to every other dot. It took forever for her to connect just one dot to all the others. We concluded it would be nearly impossible to connect EVERY dot to EVERY other dot. This was to show the complex connections going on in the brain. The more connections a brain has the more intelligent the person will be. 

 

Just for fun here's a couple pics of Sis getting her ears pierced for her 10th birthday, she was very brave!