Week 10 - SGCA Schole' in Practice

We put Schole' into practice this week, by shifting our focus towards our upcoming learning celebration the end of November.  The kids have looked at the "cinderella" story in several ancient cultures this quarter, and their celebration will be focused on performing a play.  It will have to be a surprise which one we will be doing - but see if you can guess from our props…

Morning Time

Our morning time continued to focus on the virtue of patience.  We read a story about a missionary named Joy Ridderhof, named as the "Founder of Gospel Recordings".  She showed great patience when she was faced with translating the gospel into a recording for a specific tribal language.  The recording took finding qualified people to translate and then multiple translations and checking to get it right.  

Great Books

The kids took a trip to ancient Greece today as they were read the latest book in our round of ancient "Cinderella" stories.  It was The Orphan: A Cinderella Story from Greece.  They moved to our outdoor classroom to break the story down on the story board together.  

   

Fine Arts

Our students were learning about the art of Illuminations today and beginning to create their own, using their first letter in their name.  They were then given a short lesson in creating props, and specifically, how to draw a large scene in perspective.  We also had our learning celebration committee beginning their work on props today, while the students were in class.  Our kids will be learning about the process as we go along, but the committee will be doing the execution of the artwork due to time constraints.

Schole' Lunch

Our special Schole' performer today was one of our SGCA student's parent.  A very talented musician who loves to compose music.  He sang some songs with the students and then showed them how he could make a familiar piece of music very different, by changing the various elements of it's composition.  He explained a variety of terms used in composing music, and then walked the students through creating their own original composition using his computer synthesizer, and then playing it back for the kids to hear what they created.  Out on the playground today they continued to practice their ancient Chinese game of hopping chicken and practiced double dutch jump rope.  

Science

Nature study was the focus of our science today.  The students were given a lesson in identifying and classifying leaves by the margin and venation, and then they went on a nature walk to collect a variety of leaves.  They worked with a partner to sort and classify all of the various leaf types they collected.  Their nature journal helped them sort and record their leaves according to these various categories.  

Math

Our math game today was a multiplication game called "I Have, Who Has" and the kids played several rounds of this.  To motivate them to increase their speed, we timed their round and then they were told they had to do as many push ups as they went over the two minute mark (which was shaving off about 15 seconds from their time). They were able to shave off the time on the next round, so no push ups needed!  Whew!

Latin

We had a substitute Academic Mentor today.  A Mom of one of our students was here helping us out in our Latin class.  She had a very creative idea for teaching the vocabulary words this week.  She gathered a bunch of lego and small toys that represented the various words and the kids played a game of picking an item from the bag and then they had to identify it with the correct word in Latin.  Clever and lots of fun.