Humanities

Humanities encompasses both language arts and history. This year the students will be investigating ancient civilizations. World map reading skills are helpful when beginning this exploration.

The students are strengthening their world geography skills locating and learning the land masses, oceans and river valleys. They are locating points on the world map using measurements of latitude and longitude and using a Central California map to locate points when given coordinates. These skills will help us launch into our studies of civilizations.

Creative Writing Practice

Our current creative writing project is a multi paragraph composition that asks each student to design a mandala, then interpret the symbols on their drawing into a written composition. This project will edited for spelling and grammar and the kids will then create a final draft.

We have loosely settled into a weekly routine. Mondays begin with timed creative writing practice. The purpose is to focus only on their creative process. With pencil in hand they write moving forward with their thoughts, no erasing or scratching out for 10 minutes! The rest of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are devoted to the myriad of other writing, grammar, spelling (topic-related vocabulary, compound words and 6 syllable rules) and mapping exercises on which we are working. Thursdays are a reading and literature response day. The students are divided into two groups. One group spends half the class period reading or looking for a book to check out in the rug room, while the other half of the class pens responses to their reading from the previous week in their Literature Log and finish up any unfinished project from the week.

And, of course, creating the haunted willows for Orchard’s Halloween Party was a cooperative feat worthy of many congratulations!👏👏👏👏 Your children created the entire story line for the willows experience, working to develop plot, creative description, word choices, points of interest and so on.