Greek Pentathlon

Our OCS Olympians

We had such a wonderful time in Ancient Greece!  We wrapped up our studies with a traditional pentathlon, an Ancient Greek photo booth (pillars, chiton and all), and a Greek feast of olives, hummus, figs, pita, tzatziki, grape juice, a yummy dessert, and a puppet show performance of our Aesop fable .  Here are some photos of the pentathlon...

For the long jump, a hopping course.

For the wrestling event, we hooped!

Running Event

For the javelin event, a bag toss.

Discus Event

Math

We have been working so hard subtracting, taking away, "minusing" that when we had that oh so glorious sunny day a week or so ago, I just had to take the kids outside to practice some mental subtraction math.  Some chalk, two rocks and we were ready to go!

Sunny day = outside math!

We will continue to practice our subtraction the rest of the year though we needed to take some time away from all our numerical reasoning and do some spatial reasoning. Being in Ancient Egypt will give us the perfect opportunity to learn about pyramids and other 3-D shapes!  First, we are focusing on 2-D shapes and the attributes of polygons.  We had fun learning that the names of shapes have their origins in Greek and their names correspond to their number of sides. Everyone has been practicing the word "quadrilateral." What a mouthful!

To build our spatial skills, we have been manipulating, folding and constructing shapes.  We discovered how a square can be folded into many difference shapes and how to make other shapes using pattern blocks or other shape pieces..  We used geoboards to discover properties of triangles and explore the idea of congruency.  Next up, we will see what different shapes we can create with 4, 5, and 6 triangles (hexiamonds!) and then it off to the 3-D world!!

Literacy

We have been busy with our routines of word sorts on Mondays and then a quick word sort of the same words on Wednesdays.  We then choose a column of words with the same spelling pattern and try to use as many of the words possible to create a silly sentence.  They are pretty silly and strange!  We all continue practicing long vowel patterns, some focusing on magic "e" patterns while others incorporate two vowels go walking. 

Theme

Ancient Egypt!  We have been SO busy!  We first had to learn a bit about hieroglyphs since so much of what has been learned about ancient Egypt life was discovered when the Rosetta Stone helped break the hieroglyph code and revealed it all to us!  We then learned about the people of ancient Egypt from the Pharaoh and nobles to the farmers and slaves.  We learned why and how the pyramids were built and thoroughly enjoyed making sugar cube pyramids.  Learning about mummies was high on the list, so we learned the step by step process of mummification and experimented using different salts to mummify an apple.  We found some worked much better than others!  Check out our results in this weeks Thursday packet. 

This week we are focusing on the Nile river and why people chose to live near it and how much they depended on it for survival.  We will learn Nile facts, Nile animals (hippo and crocodile), how it was the superhighway of ancient Egypt, how the flooding provided nutrients for their crops, boat building and of course, the uses of papyrus that liked to grow near it.