Weekly Wrap Up–Missouri

We started out our week with a field trip to Colonial Williamsburg.  My full post can be found here (along with info about their homeschooler events.)

Books we used:

Missouri; by Mary Ellen Lago
Missouri; by Martin Hintz
Little House on Rocky Ridge; by Roger Lea MacBride
Missouri School Days; by Roger Lea MacBride
Harry S. Truman; by Barbara Silberdick Feinberg
Profile of the Presidents Harry S. Truman; by Deborah Cannarella
Harry S. Truman; by Mike Venezia
Lewis and Clark Across the Divide; by Carolyn Gilman

Since St. Louis is famous for its barbeque ribs (and fried pickles), I couldn’t resist fixing my world famous ribs for dinner to rap up our study.  Wipe the drool from your chin and read on.

Latin:  Bring on the weather!   We added weather words to our vocabulary, and our homemade dictionaries.  Don’t you love the colorful snowflakes (and the crazy earrings on Lindsey)?

Science:  Our focus this week was on animal ecology.  Translation: we learned about extinction and endangered species.  The passenger pigeon is one of the extinct animals we learned about.  These beautiful birds were once so plentiful that they could totally black out the sun as they flew overhead.  Hunters were paid 1cent per pigeon, and some hunters earned over $1000 per WEEK.  That means that one hunter was killing 100,000 birds per week!   The last passenger pigeon died on September 1, 1914, her name was Martha.

We also learned about the slaughter of the American bison and the poor whales that were almost wiped out.  The northern or “right” whale currently has less than 1,000 remaining.  At one point there were only 250 gray whales.  In 1947 the gray whale was placed on the endangered species list and has since repopulated to approximately 22,000.

Language Arts:  We began working on a poetry book of the months.  The book includes individual illustrations by each child.  We worked on January today and oddly Lindsey drew some lovely flowers in her snow bank.  The sad part is we really DID have snow and flowers blooming in January.   During the next 20 lessons or so we’ll be wrapping it up (along with our school year).

Piano/Ballet/Tap:  Lots of progress going on in these areas.   Olivia has performance awards next weekend so our focus has been on dance practices, and LOTS of it.

Today I was able to get together with another group of moms to discuss unit studies.   I think we all picked up some good ideas, and some positive reinforcement.    I took a couple of our lapbooks and shared those and they were a big hit.

Don’t forget to visit the Weekly Wrap Up this week.