Dear Families,
This
was an awfully busy week. For starters, we finished our study of the American
Revolution. This began by looking at the creation of our colony. One of our
resources, Social Studies Weekly, had
a graph sharing the population of the South Carolina colony throughout the early
years. It was titled “People Living in South Carolina.” It showed that in 1670
there were about 200 people living in this colony. That was somewhat surprising
given there were at least 29 different tribes of Native Americans living here
at the time. Wouldn’t it be safe to assume there were probably well more than
1,000 Native Americans in South Carolina? It turns out they were not included
in this population tally. We wondered why they were not considered “people”.
Our study of the American
Revolution centered on anger created by the Stamp Act and the Tea Tax. Everyone
was particularly interested to learn about the Boston Tea Party. Though this
falls outside the scope of South Carolina history it is still quite important
in understanding the mood that caused so many colonists to fight for
independence. We also found that some colonists remained loyal to England
while others were unsure what to believe.
Next week we will shift our focus
away from historical studies and begin inquires into motion and sound. Motion
is always fun because we get to observe, measure, and manipulate the movement
of objects while working to construct, or at least validate, laws of motion. We
will drop, roll, push, pull, and throw a whole variety of objects to see what
we can find. Late next week the kids will choose a question they want to
explore through experimentation and demonstration. Once they settle on a
question, such as Do all objects fall at
the same rate?, they will develop an experiment they can conduct to help
them move closer to an answer. They will conduct these experiments at home and
come back ready to share the results with photos, video, PPT, or a live
demonstration. I will send more
information about this late next week.
In math we have been playing
around with measurement. We began by measuring all sorts of our things using
non-standard units of measure – digits, palms, spans, cubits, and fathoms.
You’ll have to ask your child for a demonstration. Using what we have been
learning about fractional parts, the kids represented their measurements as
such: 6 ½ palms, 2 1/5 fathoms, etc. Finding these fractional parts was quite
challenging in that they had to use their spatial abilities (in this case
visualizing) to determine the appropriate fraction.
After a few days with these units
we switched to standard units such as inches, feet, and yards. We learned you can
represent measurements as either 1 1/3 yards or 1 yard and 1 foot. We also
learned that you don’t really need to measure each object three times.
If you know how many feet there are you should be able to calculate
both the number of inches and the number of yards. This was very challenging
but each of the kids made it their own depending on their current abilities to
develop strategies for such problems.
We have also been hard at work on
our biography expert projects. Look for their rough drafts to come home next
Monday. I’m asking them to look these drafts over with you with an eye out for missing
information as well as basic edits and revisions. We’ll need those back on
Wednesday to begin publishing. We’ll do the bulk of the publishing at
school given they have worked this week to publish a piece at home already.
Please remember we are saying
goodbye to Ms. Ruff on Thursday. We’ll be awfully sad to see her go!
Have a great weekend,
Chris
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