additional thoughts and reminders for Jan 22

Hello!

We had a great day this week. Mrs. McBreen (Ayla's mom) was a tremendous help. She stayed busy helping us blow eggs and experiment on a fish, etc. Many thanks!

I attended a 3-day conference here at Trinity that was helpful, inspiring, intimidating, and mind-stretching. I hope to implement some of the things I learned to be a better teacher to your children. It did, however, take from my preparation time. I was at Wal-mart buying a goldfish and other supplies around midnight Monday night! I still think we had a good day and the children seemed engaged and they encouraged me throughout the day.

My odd last name comes from Ukraine so the lesson we talked about was of a personal nature to me and I was able to share a few family possessions and traditions that originated in the Russian/Ukraine area. Your student was greeted with bread and salt as is traditional. We discussed how precious salt was at times and was even used for trade. We blew our own eggs and decorated them after studying the pisanky that are so important to Ukrainians. We looked at and read an opera from the Bat Theatre in Moscow called Katinka. I had hoped to move to a room with a piano and pick out the tune for them but time ran out.

Also in History, a huge chunk of time was devoted to updating our time-lines. At the beginning of the year we aspired to memorizing these dates and events. At times it has been difficult to "mesh" this information with SOTW. Take a look at the timeline with your child and discuss it. Mrs. Esther and I are working on coming up with an abbreviated chart that should be easier to memorize.

In science we conducted the experiment from the end of lesson 6. We concluded we need to improve our scientific method because we did not have an adequate procedure for measuring the effect of the changing temperature on our fish. We did discuss the scientific method a bit. It is okay if your hypothesis is wrong. You have still gained valuable information. My competitive students seem to think you've "lost" if you hypothesized wrongly!

We labelled a few sentences in Grammar and then I decided to take a week off in hopes that you can bring your students up to date and polish up what we've learned so far. I myself need to refresh my memory after the Christmas break. We'll start off next time with new, big concepts.
(direct objects and pattern 2 sentences)

I estimate next week and one more in King Arthur then we'll begin a Robin Hood book.

Report cards will be ready next week. This is my plan (which I haven't gotten approved by Nicole yet): If your student has everything turned in to me through last week (week 16) their report card will be ready for distribution on Tuesday. If there are items you're planning to turn in on Tuesday, I'll need to check those and will have your report cards ready for pick up on Thursday of next week. I know this may present a problem for families that don't come to Trinity on Thursday with an older sibling. I think you could choose to either stop by around 1:45 on Thursday the 24th to get them from Nicole or just wait until next class period and receive your child's report card then. I wanted to offer one last chance to those who still have work from this grading period to turn in.

Thank you for the time you gave to reading the Bible lesson. I had lots of participation. I let them tell me the "so what" of the lesson. If you haven't picked up on our discussion method yet, here is how we do it. After spending time in God's Word and reviewing it, we ask ourselves--"So what?" We then try to apply the passage to our present day life. What can we do differently or how are we effected because we spent time in God's scripture? I encourage them to do this anytime they study the Bible.

I love your children and look forward to next Tuesday!

Mrs. Tkach