St. Lawrence Classical Academy

Beginning of third 9 weeks

2010-01-25T10:33:00.004-06:00

We are the beginning of our third 9 weeks -- our halfway mark. Our "Changing Seasons" project is going fantastic. The kids have enjoyed looking at the monthly photos from around the world and learning about other cultures along with seeing the wide range in temperatures. It has been great to have Perth, Australia as part of our project since it has been a visual tool to teach that the weather on the southern hemisphere is the opposite of the weather here on the northern hemisphere. It's been fun to even see our own photos changing; a lot is missed if one doesn't take the time to look. Some of our participants fell out at the beginning of the project, but right now we have the cities as follows:

U. S. Cities

Fort Worth, TX
Plano, TX
Evanston, IL
Sterling Heights, MI
St. Louis, MO
Columbia, MO
Oakdale, PA
Palmyra, VA

International Cities

Perth, Australia
Waterloo, Canada
Bucharest, Romania
Espoo, Finland
Isfara, Tajikistan

We still have to do our field trip for this project, and I have a few ideas. Fort Worth Botanic Gardens will be having a butterfly exhibit in March; this would be a great field trip to celebrate spring's arrival. I was also thinking about a field trip to Turner Falls in OK where we could go hiking and exploring. They both sound fun so maybe we'll do both. :-)

We are just finishing up the last part of our space exploration in 2nd grade science. When we are finished, we will take a field trip to the planetarium -- probably some time around the end of February. Katherine is required to write her first research paper on Venus. It is to be one page in length and use at least 2 or 3 sources. I showed her how to take notes on note cards, and we'll work on bibliographies this week. The deadline for it is next week, and I reminded her that most of the work on it needs to be done outside of our classroom.

In history, we continue to explore the middle ages and are now just finishing the Battle of Hastings. History is Katherine's favorite class, and she will tell you that the old days are the best days. :-) We study geography while we study history so she can get a grasp on where the places are we are studying and how they relate to other locations. Sometime near the end of the school year, we will do a biographical research paper over someone we studied this year.

In Saxon 3, we are currently learning our times tables in math and basic division. We have gone over telling time by 5 minute intervals, fractions, perimeters, identifying perfect squares and using comparison symbols. We are daily working on pattern recognition, telling time, telling the date and adding money.

PreK4 is going well. Mary is enthusiastic about learning and excited at every classroom lesson. She is through the consonant letter Q in the alphabet. She can site almost all of the capital letters but still struggles with some of the lowercase letters and sounds. I'm hoping to finish the alphabet in the next month and start her on her first books -- Bob Books. We are using Saxon Math K for her math, and she loves math. She is quite good at counting, easily seeing the patterns in the numbers as they go up. She seems to enjoy the repetition of the daily calendar and patterns.

So far this year has been pretty good for the group. We still have not gotten into a routine for our Latin classes (although have still manged to learn some Latin words and prayers). Katherine is doing good on the piano, but since my knowledge only goes so far, it would be nice to find her another teacher to continue these lessons. We are going over the Ten Commandments in Religion class. PreK4 is required to memorize the commandment and 2nd grade is required to memorize the commandment and its meaning. In Art class, we have learned all the line families and their characteristics and have worked on some sight copying. Katherine is really enjoying Art class; Mary likes to do her own thing. But that's fine with me.

Start of 2009-2010 School Year

2009-09-18T12:21:00.014-05:00

After what seemed to be a very short summer, we are back at school for the 2009-2010 school year. We have created another online collaborative project from this year called the Changing Seasons. We have 10 U.S. participants and 5 international participants. The U.S participants are from the locations as follows:

Fort Worth, TX
Plano, TX
Evanston, IL
Sterling Heights, MI
St. Louis, MO
Columbia, MO
Albuquerque, NM
Oakdale, PA
Palmyra, VA
Westminster, CA

Our international locations are as follows:

Espoo, Finland
Perth, Australia
Waterloo, Canada
Bucharest, Romania
Isfara, Tajikistan

Essentially, the project will have all participants taking at least one photo of their location at the same time every month, for 9 months. After the 9 months, we should be able to see the changing seasons from a visual view along with a graph of the monthly temperatures. We have a great group of participants from all different types of school settings - some traditional schools, some home schools and some just families who wanted to volunteer. Everyone has been very excited about it and positive on the additional activities we've created such as recording field trips celebrating the seasons and having the kids lists what they like about each month.

Katherine is in 2nd grade this year, and she will continue in the same subjects as last year. Her history will now cover the middle ages. She will be doing Saxon 3 Math. Her science this year will cover space and our world. Geography will be incorporated in her history class, the Changing Seasons project and beginning state recognition. Latin, piano, language arts, spelling and copy work will continue from last year's stopping point.

Mary started PreK 4 and is very excited about starting school. She has started Saxon K Math and has math class 3 days a week. She has also started learning her vowels and their sounds. On Fridays, 2nd grade and PreK 4 art class and religion class is combined for their lessons. All grades also participant in ballet for physical education.

I am looking forward to discovering all types of field trips to take the kids on to celebrate the different seasons of the year. Some thoughts are a pumpkin patch, Christmas tree stand, plant store, camping and a farm. I also want to add a lot more music and artwork to their daily studies. We'll see what I come up with this year.

Wrapping up 1st grade...

2009-06-19T10:36:00.000-05:00

We are at the end of our 2008-2009 school year, and it has been great. We have completed Saxon 2 this year, and Katherine has mastered a lot of new concepts. She has learned addition, subtraction, fractions, multiplication, reading graphs, measuring, finding areas and perimeters, estimating, and much more. Although not her favorite subject, she has done very well and knows the material. Although she is only in the 1st grade, she is reading on a 4th grade level and is constantly surprising me with what she has learned on her own. We have worked on the basics of sentence structure, and I think her unending reading will definitely help when we begin breaking out sentence structure. In science we study plants and gardened to watch how plants grow. We also studied the human body. Her favorite subject is history, and this year we studied ancient history. She liked learning about Rome the best, from its early beginnings to the time Christians were martyred. We worked on an Internet project, "It's Spring" during the spring. It was a lot of fun to work with other people around the country. We observed how the temperatures fell across the U.S. as cold fronts came in, and how it warmed up as warm fronts replaced them. It was neat to see how even though the sun was shining in Fort Worth, there was snow falling in Ontario. Katherine was able to write her first poem ever for the project and we made a field trip to the Botanic Gardens to draw pictures of Texas spring and as part of our science program this year.

It's Spring Project Update

2009-03-31T09:20:00.000-05:00

We are at the half way mark -- only 5 more weeks to go. The participants seem to be enjoying the project, and it has been fun reading their students' book narratives. The poetry section was a little difficult for me since we hadn't studied poetry before. We decided to do a character poem and it was fun to do together. Here is the poem.

The Root Children
Katherine – 6 yr old, 1st grade
Fort Worth, TX

The Root Children
Are playful and happy.
They love Mother Earth;
They are excited about the masquerade.
They need the rainbow for paint;
They share it with the bugs.
When Winter comes, they go to bed.
Mother Earth plays her lute.

As part of our lesson on spring, we also took a field trip to the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens were we studied different aspects of plant growth, bird calls and native plants. We were early in the season to see all of the flowers at their best so we decided to plan another trip in April. Katherine took the opportunity while we were there to draw and color a picture of the beautiful springtime.

"It's Spring" internet project

2009-02-18T15:48:00.000-06:00

We are about to begin our 11 week internet project, "It's Spring" on Monday, February 23rd. Our focus primarily is to calculate the daily temperatures around the country as we come into the spring season and see how the different regions experience Spring differently. We have been blessed with five other cities joining us here in Fort Worth: Albuquerque, NM; Galloway, OH; Holtville, CA; Waterloo, ON Canada and St. Louis, MO. Although our class has been involved with internet projects before, we are especially excited to start our own so we can coordinate this project with other homeschoolers. Homeschooling give the flexibility to do as little or as much as one wants to do, and it will be interesting to see how the different schools adapt this project and make it their own. As a way to keep some congruency, time tables have been established to help the schools along. Every two weeks an additional part of the project will be due. The first step is to notate the daily temperatures, the second step will be to find a book about Springtime that your class especially loves and read it, keeping in mind that you might be narrating it in the future. We have examples of simple poetry that is easily taught to this age group and hope that we will have many contributions to the Spring Poetry page. There is also a page for photos or for class art work on Springtime in their area. Creativity is the only guideline for this aspect of the project.