Assignments for September 25, 2007

Hello Parents and Students,

We had a great day yesterday. Your students may not agree with me on that but it was good to bring some organization to our notebooks and assignments. The time spent on that precluded us from another big art project--and that's our favorite! Reassure your children that I'm working on "big" plans for next week and we will finish our Monk crosses as well.

I'm making these assignments assuming you all have received my long e-mail discussing how we were adjusting the pace of how the whole school is studying Story of the World. It also included some clarification on Shurley Grammar stating that the teaching text will be completed at home with parents. Our activities in class will be to enrich your at home studies. My grades for grammar will come exclusively from in-class work and specific homework assignments the students hand in to me.

If you haven't read that e-mail, please let me know and I will get a copy in your hands ASAP!

History Assignments for 9/25/07
--produce a narration for each of the sections in Chapter 3 of Story of the World. Most will have already completed this and even more, but this is how I want our assignment pattern to work. Students will write about what they learned in class. We are ahead of ourselves because of slowing down to keep on track with the older classes. Enjoy an easy week with your children and we will all be together throughout the school. This will also allow your whole family to read Story of the World together.

--complete Map of Saint Augustine's Route (Student Page 12) Again, they will probably already have done this.

--complete Medieval Manuscript page (student page 13)

--read Chapter 4 "The Byzantine Empire"

--illustrate your time line

--as we tried to organize and check our notebooks in class, I noticed one student had all of a chapter's narrations on one page. She had labeled the separate sections and it was clear and beautifully done. This may help all of us. I think I may have orginally asked for each section to be on a separate page but I see this is not necessary. Please have your student produce narrations according to their capabilities. A sentence or two for my second graders is plenty. My third graders can push themselves to produce up to 4 or 5 sentence

Literature Assignment for 9/25/07
--read the first two chapters of Minstrel in the Tower

Grammar Assignments for 9/25/07
--review ch.2 and administer test
--complete chapter 3 in Shurley Grammar from the teaching text
--study all vocabulary words through Chapter 3 List #2 that are in your Grammar section. We will take a quiz. We will be using memory games and fun competitions each week to be sure we are keeping up to speed with these words. A quiz will happen only occasionally.
--Tuesday I will be teaching on common or proper nouns and complete subjects and complete predicates.
--please put all activities in the grammar section of your notebooks.
--2nd grade students: please do not feel compelled to complete the writing activity at the end of ch. 3. This is a curriculum for 3rd graders and your students will be best served if they avoid frustrations that these higher level assignments may cause them. Let's just immerse them in the grammar and let them benefit from that.

Science Assignments for 9/25/07
--complete notebook activity at the end of Ch. 1
--begin ocean box