Way Out in the Desert: Week 6 August 11th

We had another good week. We are getting back into the swing of things and it is going well. I have adjusted some of Turkey Lips' work load and that has made a difference. We were doing two grammar lessons a day and we have bumped that down to one grammar a day. I also told him that I would like for him to be able to do his grammar on his own (after I have taught new material) by October. He seemed comfortable with that and it is now a goal we can work toward.

This week we completed:

Bible Study for All Ages

Math U See

Rod and Staff Grammar

Spell to Write and Read

Recorder Lessons

We didn't get to our Art Appreciation this week. I am hoping that we can complete two lessons this coming week.

For TOG we read part of a book on George Washington (to be completed in the coming weeks) and we also read about the French and Indian War. Turkey Lips was very surprised to find out that George Washington was first fighting with the British Army. We also worked on a shadow puppet play from Homeschool in the Woods http://www.homeschoolinthewoods.com/HTTA/TTS/AmericanRevolution.htm . We still have some practicing to do on that. Here Turkey Lips is cutting the box for the puppet stage.

For Turkey Lips' writing assignment for TOG he had to read an article from the encyclopedia and write a summary of what he had read. The unit project is to write a newspaper and it starts with learning to write summaries. Turkey chose an article on Dragons. Here is what he wrote.

A dragon looks like a lizard. One of the reasons is there tongue then both stick out. Another reason is the scales. They both have scales. The last reason is they both have tails.

Legends told that dragons were in Europe. The legends say that dragons guarded treasure. If you killed the dragon you would get the treasure that it guarded. Stories also say that dragons lived in forests.

Chinese people thought dragons were powerful. They believed dragons were powerful. They believed dragons could control the rain. The Chinese thought if they wore a dragon costume they would protect the new year. They believed dragons would not hurt you.

I believe dragons were real because the Bible says so in Job chapter 41. If the bible says dragons were real that means they could breathe fire and the legends people told were true.

For Five in a Row Lizard Legs (Turtle Toes has been asked to be renamed) worked on Wee Gillis. One of the projects we did was to try and measure how much air our lungs could hold. I found the idea and instructions on the Five in a Row website in the archives. Here are the directions.

"How much air in your lungs:fill a plastic 2 liter bottle with water and put the lid on; hold it upside down in a bowl of water and take the lid off under the water; push a flexible straw into the neck of the bottle and blow gently until your lungs are empty; all the air you breathe out gets trapped at the top of the bottle; this is how much air your lungs can hold.Just a note remembering from my college years...you can NOT measure your TOTAL LUNG capacity without emptying the lungs completely, not possible while one is alive. Sorry I do not recall WHAT the term is for the air that you can exhale in such a GREAT experiment! Thanks for sharing. FOUND IT! "Vital Capacity Definition: The volume of air that is exhaled by a maximal expiration following a maximal inspiration." from http://debussy.hon.ch/cgi-bin/HONsel...5.750.900#MeSH Also see "Total Lung Capacity Definition: The volume of air contained in the lungs at the end of a maximal inspiration. It is the equivalent to each of the following sums: vital capacity plus residual volume; inspiratory capacity plus functional residual capacity; tidal volume plus inspiratory reserve volume plus functional residual capacity; tidal volume plus inspiratory reserve volume plus expiratory reserve volume plus residual volume." from http://debussy.hon.ch/cgi-bin/HONsel...86.700.485.750 Now that stuffs technical so I'd want to phrase it somehow so that the kids know that there's some air left in the lungs that cannot be measured that way. :-)"