Year 5 :: Week 7 :: Changing Things a Bit

I am not changing our curriculum choices but how I do this report. I am already bored writing these every week, so I can imagine how it might be for you, the reader! 
I will share our week's work by highlighting the interesting parts. If for example, we studied something unusual in Canadian history or science, I will write about it here.
Every school day, we work on math and language arts (grammar, spelling, phonics for Celeste, handwriting, reading aloud) , these are the basics. The rest of the subjects get done over the week, sometimes once, others 3 to 4 days a week.

This past week, we focused on world geography and in particular learned more about Mexico. After completing the trivia questions and the map work, we read two books from the library. The first one was P is for Pinata: A Mexico Alphabet written by Tony Johnston. I love this series of alphabet books (if you check the link, there are teacher's guides to go with most book titles). P is for Pinata showed us more of the Mexican culture and history. As we read along, we paused to google some extra things, like this video of the Danza de los viejitos from reading the page on Mexican dancing.

The second title was Cinco de Mayo: Celebrating the Traditions of Mexico by Dian Hoyt-Goldsmith. This story follows a young Mexican American girl from California as she learns about her heritage and prepares for Cinco de Mayo celebrations. There is a lot of information in this book about food, history, music and dancing with many colourful photographs.

Through My Wonderful World Newsletter from National Geographic, I found out that from September 15 to October 15 is Hispanic Heritage Month and many links were included for extra information and activities in the e-mail newsletter. We went to the Smithsonian Latino Center's Theater of the Dead and learned about the costums and beliefs around Dia de los Muertos. We also took turns building a virtual altar.

We will be baking some Pan de Muertos tomorrow and eat some more Mexican foods this coming week too.

Tuesday was International Day of Peace and we made a point of having a very peaceful and quiet day. We painted some rocks with the word Peace on it. You can see them here.

In science this week, we learned all about gravity and did some basic experiments (dropping our pencils from various heights!). We also had a lot of fun with this activity, finding out how much we would each weigh on different planets. Celeste weighs 48.5 lbs on Earth, 8 lbs on the moon, and 114.6 lbs on Jupiter!

We also managed to start our Art and Music Appreciation study this week! We are following this Harmony Fine Arts program  . I wasn't able to purchase all the music and art books, but I have been able to find enough music CDs and related art books at the library. We have been listening to Felix Mendelssohn during our lunches and I even put it on while I was cleaning today!

The artist this week is Rembrandt van Rijn and I read aloud Rembrandt and the Boy Who Drew Dogs by Molly Blaisdell, which was a lovely story about Rembrandt and his own son Titus. The story included some of the artist's paintings. 

We looked at more of Rembrandt van Rijn's art online. I chose  Night Watch as our current wallpaper on our computer.

Adrienne, Andre and I are all keeping a notebook for this subject. This week, we started with the two artists biographies and the beginning of our time line. The time period is from 1600 to about 1850, we made ours go until 1900.

I hope you enjoy reading our weekly report in this way better. I know I enjoyed writing it much more than the list I had been doing the previous weeks!