Learning Log 13

The week before thanksgiving, our family had a fun time experiencing the last of the good weather before the snow hit. To begin, all the children worked hard on their math.  Peter started and finished chapter 22.  He learned how to find the greatest common factors and how to find the prime factors for numbers.  He reviewed solving for the unknown side of a polygon setting up proportions, finding the square root of numbers, and finding a certain percentage of numbers.  Elsie finished her math chapter 22, where she divided 2 digit numbers into 3 digit numbers.  She also reviewed finding the areaa of various polygons.  She did lots of story problems, and practiced reading less known graphs.  Kimball did chapter 16 in his math book (last week I got off, I had said he did chapter 18, but it was really 15.  Sorry).  He worked on multiplying by 4s.  He also reviewed his other multiplication facts and did several story problems.  He found the perimeter and area of different rectangles.  Anna recieved her new math book, Alpha, in the mail this week.  She was so excited, she did the first 2 chapters!  She worked on building and reading large numbers, and practiced writing to 20.  

For Language Arts, Peter read about 50 pages of his book about the Periodic Table.  He also wrote a short story about a guy in Minecraft, and he did his debate about the Olympics he had prepped for.  Elsie read about 50 pages of The Railway Children.  She also practiced her cursive handwriting, and finished a story she had started a while ago called The Girl and the Dragon.  She is planning on giving it to Anna for Christmas.  Shhhh.  Kimball finished reading his book, Climbing Higher!  He was very happy about it.  He also did several pages of his handwriting.  Anna worked on her primer book, and read a chapter outloud to me.  She also read a couple Dash into Reading books (books 4 and 5 I believe).  She also did several pages, practicing her handwriting.  All the kids also made certificates for one of there siblings, discribing a quality they liked about them.

 For Science Peter went to his Forensic's class and did another lab on fingerprinting.  He also went with his Pyramid Project class and toured a facility that designs and builds robots.  He really liked watching this one robot that is being designed to help carry soldiers off a battle field.  He was inspired as it being a career possibility.  All of us had a fun time watching a you tube channel about a guy, Steiner, who holds the world record at rock skipping.  He has skipped 88 times!  The YouTube channel we watched, called wired, had a guy who met up with Steiner.  We recognized the place they met as first dam, right in Logan!  They met in Logan because USU has, possibly the only, splash lab in the country.  The clip showed them skipping rocks and then them going up to USU to talk to a professor there and run some tests.  We learned how important Gyroscopic Rotation (spin)_, is when you skip a rock.  We learned the best angle rock can skip at, and how rock skipping research is applicable to space research.  Then we all went to First Dam and tried our own hand at rock skipping, trying to apply the new principles we had just learned.  Peter and Kimball found some rocks that looked exactly like the rocks Steiner had brought with him, from Lake Eerie by his town in Pennsylvania.  They kept them as souvenirs.  Elsie and Anna had fun feeding the ducks the scraps of their lunch.  Elsie even caught and held an extra friendly duck!

Peter worked on Minecraft for his Tech.  He took demensions of his room and printed off some graph paper.  He drew out what his room would look like to size.  The other kids worked on their business class.  We watched a short movie clip called He Polished My Toe and we learned that there is a solution to every problem.  We talked about how it's important to be creative when thinking of solutions. 

For Music Peter, Elsie, and Kimball worked hard!  They had an extra choir practice and they performed at the Logan Tabernacle after a Tree Lighting festival.  They sang Christmas songs they had been working on.  They sang some in English, one in Latin, one in Italian, and one in German!  Elsie even did a duet on her violin with a friend, and played Joy to the World.  They all worked on practicing their string and piano pieces as well and went to their prospective lessons.  Anna is getting to where to can play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, with all the variations on both her piano and violin.