Greetings! We're two-thirds of the way done with the semester - time is flying! We accomplished a lot this week and have a bunch of new stuff coming up. Be sure to read below and check your CH B guide carefully to make sure you don't miss anything!
DEVOTION:
Mr. Markel led us in a devotion on discretion (Proverbs 22:3). Next week, Ms. Jones is up to talk about tolerance (Philippians 2:2). Going forward, I'd like for the presenter to share (1) a definition of the character trait, (2) relevant Scripture they found, and (3) one to three questions to ask the class about applying the trait in their lives. The goal is for our devotion time to be more discussion-oriented, and facilitated primarily by the student leader.
LATIN:
We continued in Lesson 9 (conjugating verbs). This coming week, you will be in Lessons 9 and 10. In class, we reviewed several characteristics of verbs - this is material covered in Essentials, as well, so it was review for some of the students.
Characteristics of VERBS include:
(1) Voice:
A. Active - where the subject acts or is being: I praise the king.
B. Passive - where the subject acted upon: The king is praised.
(2) Mood:
A. Indicative - a statement or asks a question;
B. Subjunctive - expresses a condition which is doubtful or not factual / used to explore conditional or imaginary situations;
He is allowed. in the subjunctive becomes: It is essential he be allowed.
I was ordered. in the subjunctive becomes: If I were ordered, I'd go.
I was in your position two years ago. in the subjunctive becomes: If I were in your position, I would do the same.
C. Imperative - forms commands or requests
(3) Tense:
A. Present (I verb)
B. Imperfect (I was verbing)
C. Future (I shall verb)
D. Perfect (I verbed; I have verbed)
E. Pluperfect (I had verbed)
F. Future Perfect (I shall have verbed)
(4) Number (singular or plural)
(5) Person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd)
REMEMBER, to conjugate a verb:
1 You must learn the 4 PRINCIPAL PARTS OF A VERB from the vocabularies.
2 The present infinitive active shows to which conjugation the verb belongs.
3 Then you find the stem; and
4 Add the ending!
THE FOUR REGULAR CONJUGATIONS are:
(model verbs are on p.43 in the blue Henle book)
1st: -āre
2nd: -ēre
3rd: -ere
4th: -īre
Don't forget to keep working on vocabulary - the Mastery Review Vocabulary List for Units 1 and 2 (p. 91-98 in the purple book) AND the new words from the past two weeks.
PARENTS: Exercise 131 this week can be used as an assessment of your student's understanding. ;)
LTW:
I enjoyed hearing the students' essays for Where the Red Fern Grows. Everyone's writing is improving - sounding more fluid, including great verbs and adjectives, covering all the elements of the prescribed essay form - great work! I asked the students to focus on a couple of things for the next essay:
(1) Incorporate context and background into your introduction (e.g., "Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls, tells the story of a boy becoming a man through his perseverance to buy and train hunting dogs...."). The context and background you provide could be one or several sentences long.
(2) Try to make your amplification very smooth and not sounding like you are just stating and answering a question (e.g., the wrong way: "This is important to Billy's parents because they care about him." Better: "Even though getting his dogs seemed to be the most important thing to Billy, it is more important for him to wait because otherwise he could destroy all the trust his dad has in him.")
We also started our discussion on The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom. What an amazing story of God's faithfulness, provision, and protection, and the incredible hope and peace we can have in Him, even amidst the most painful circumstances! There are many resources online about this remarkable woman and her story. Here are a few you can check out:
This week, students will draft their own issue, complete the assigned workbook pages in the guide, and create an ANI chart with at least 30 items in each column.
LOGIC:
We finished up with lessons #23-26 in class, including working through how terms are distributed in a syllogism and how to test syllogisms by rules. I think we are at a point where students (and parents?) might benefit from some extra logic practice - as a group and outside of class. I'll include some possible dates for this in the email, too.
Now we're moving on to lessons 27-29. In last week's blog, I mistakenly said you would only have one week on these lessons. We actually have two weeks (whew!) - this week, be sure to:
(1) Read through ALL assigned lessons (#27-29),
(2) Make and study vocabulary terms for lessons 27-29, and
(3) As much as you are able, begin working through the exercises.
I gave everyone one more week to try to solve Einstein's Riddle. If you do, bring your answer to class....
Einstein's Riddle
(Supposedly, Einstein wrote this riddle and said that 98% of the world could not solve it.)
The situation:
- There are 5 houses in five different colors.
- In each house lives a person with a different nationality.
- These five owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet.
- No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar, or drink the same beverage.
The question is: Who owns the fish?
Hints:
- the Brit lives in the red house
- the Swede keeps dogs as pets
- the Dane drinks tea
- the green house is on the left of the white house
- the green house's owner drinks coffee
- the person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
- the owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
- the man living in the center house drinks milk
- the Norwegian lives in the first house
- the man who smokes blends lives next to the one who keeps cats
- the man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill
- the owner who smokes BlueMaster drinks beer
- the German smokes Prince
- the Norwegian lives next to the blue house
- the man who smokes blend has a neighbor who drinks water
MATH:
For our lesson review, we discussed rectangular coordinates, the addition-subtraction, multiplication, and division rules for equations, and reciprocal fractions. We also spent a good chunk of our review time going over sample problems from Saxon lessons 1-7. I will forward those questions and answers to you via email - it's good practice for possible math problems on the Blue Book exam. :) We also completed our usual drills on multiplication facts and Basic Math Facts - we had quite a few students get perfect scores or only one or two wrong. We are on our way to ice cream!!!
SCIENCE:
The Shoebox Project was so much fun! First, we tried to identify the scientists only by the clues, then we looked at their biography cards for additional help. Everyone did a great job! Although everyone also left their shoebox at the end of the day.... ;) They are in my trunk if you want to collect yours next week.
Each student also presented on Einstein - his theory of special relativity (what was assigned), but we also heard about the theory of general relativity and a biography of Einstein's life. Be sure you are carefully reading your Challenge B Guide and the blog each week so you understand what is assigned. ;)
That is an excellent segue to...SCIENCE FAIR!
We are diving in this week to our science fair projects. We spent quite a bit of time discussing what is expected, what needs to be done, etc. on Monday afternoon. If you missed this, be especially sure to review everything in the Guide and let me know if you have any questions. This is also an excellent resource for students and parents: http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_guide_index.shtml
For this week, please make sure you do the following - you don't want to get behind on this project!
(1) Become VERY familiar with the information contained on pages 181-187 of your Guide.
(a) The main point of the Science Fair project is for you to become comfortable with using and understanding the scientific method (p. 181).
(b) Through this process and your experiments, you will be answering each of the questions on page 182.
(c) Utilize the Notecard Format on page 183 in your research. Make sure you are not copying information without crediting your sources! Summarize the information instead, putting it into your OWN words. PARENTS: Please use this opportunity to discuss plagiarism with your student - what it is and how to avoid it.
(d) Over each of the next weeks, you will be writing parts of your Research Plan. A sample is on pages 184 and 185. Your Research Plan will ultimately be the foundation for your Research Paper, which you will finalize upon completing your experiments.
(e) SCHEDULE: The Science Fair Project Schedule (p. 186) details what you are to be doing every week. Be very familiar with this document, and let me know if you have
(2) Decide on the topic of your science fair project. Identify what problem you will investigate. If you need ideas, check out www.sciencebuddies.org.
(3) As you find information online (e.g., sciencebuddies.com) or in books or articles during your research, make sure you are writing your notes in your own words and not copying text verbatim or so similarly that you risk plagiarizing material. There are several free online tools to check your text for plagiarism, too (e.g., https://www.paperrater.com/plagiarism_checker or https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism). Try testing one of your science or LTW papers and see how you've done so far this year.
(4) Using the Sample Research Plan/Paper Template (pg. 184-185 in the Guide), draft your Research Problem. This is a brief description (1-2 paragraphs) of the problem you will research. This page on sciencebuddies.org might be helpful for this part of the assignment: http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_question.shtml
(5) Take a look at the Judge's Form (p. 187) for additional direction on what you should be including in your project.
I will give everyone a log book on Monday. You will use this to record basically everything you are doing on your project going forward. Parents, you can also check out the tutorials for Science Fair on CC Connected in the research strand.
CURRENT EVENTS:
In class, students divided into two groups and outlined presentations on either side of the issue: Should the president be elected by popular vote instead of the electoral college? This week was our best set of presentations so far. The arguments were articulated and expanded upon well. We'll follow the same format next week: find one affirmative article and one negative article for our premise, write a notecard for each article outlining three proofs, an exordium, and an amplification for each side, and take notes or highlight your articles to show more detail and explanation for your proofs.
To make sure that everyone is getting the most out of this strand, we'll share our proofs and exordiums in class. If we have time, we will pair up for presentations, too, instead of dividing in half. That way, each student can take the lead in drafting and presenting more of the arguments.
The premise for this week is Should the United States should financially support countries that persecute Christians? We discussed definitions for "financially support", "persecute", and "countries". As we discussed in class, a great place to start researching this topic is with two implicit ideas:
- There are countries to which the US sends aid, and
- There are countries that persecute Christians.
Find a list of each of these and then compare: does the US send money to countries that persecute Christians? Why? Try to find articles that show current policies that do support countries who persecute or allow persecution of Christians - such as the recent nuclear deal with Iran. For example, according to Open Doors USA, the number two country on their list of persecuted Christians is Iraq, yet we have spent billions in support of Iraq. Why? Is it because we support their persecution of Christians? Because the US is trying to build a democratic state in the region? Is it for humanitarian aid? Something else?
The question then becomes should we offer humanitarian aid to countries that do not share our human rights policies? For that matter, do Christians support the human rights policies of the US? What *are* the human rights policies of the US?
Another way to look at it is to focus on the premise and be sure it's defined enough to research. The affirmative position is that the US government should financially support countries that persecute Christians and the negative is that the US government should not financially support countries that persecute Christians. What does it mean to financially support a country? Loans? Grants? Aid? Other assistance?
Here are a few websites that might be helpful as you wrestle with these issues:
For class, make sure to bring:
- both articles and notecards (with your exordium, 3 proofs, amplification, and subproofs already written down or highlighted in your articles and ready to share), and
- a relevant Bible verse on this topic.
POSTREMO:
* Please make sure you check in with me before leaving class each week - even if your ride is waiting for you. ;) This past Monday, everyone disappeared and Reese and Joy had to do everything by themselves. :(
* Watch for the email about our next movie night (The Hiding Place) and a Logic study group meet-up...and get back to me on dates.
* Stay on top of your Science Fair project!
See you on Monday!
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