Classical Conversations Cycle 2 Week 19

We’ve entered the final 6 weeks! It’s the downhill slope, but it sometimes feels more like it’s the hardest part of the year. I read a great blog post entitled “Everyone wants to quit in November and February” a week or so ago. It can be encouraging just to realize that you aren’t the only one who feels worn out! Hang in there, folks!

History

Well, here’s the thing. The Korean War is often called the “Forgotten War” and that makes finding great kid-friendly sources about it a little, ummmm . . . challenging.

Crash Course History has a video on the Cold War, which begins with Korea (first 5 minutes of the video, then it moves on the Vietnam) and includes a lot of good information. My guess is that it’s probably too much for a most of our elementary-level students and even many of the middle-schoolers, although if you’re like me, you sometimes just dig in and watch/read as much as your kiddos will tolerate and think that it will be beneficial to them, if only to reinforce the actual words that are part of this week’s history sentence (North, South, Korea, MacArthur, etc.).

Here are three websites with overviews of the Korean War. I might or might not actually go through them with my children, but I feel much better informed after perusing them. They gave me some context for the war that I didn’t previously understand (apparently watching reruns of M.A.S.H. can’t really be considered historically informative).

1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX58.html (this was originally linked to an American Experience episode called “Race for the Superbomb” that can be found on YouTube. It’s not really kid-friendly, but I’ll include the link here for the history junkies among us – http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFAB7A155AF3204CA. The part specifically about North Korea runs from Part 3 at about 13:30 and on into Part 4 for the first few minutes.)
2. http://www.ducksters.com/history/cold_war/korean_war.php (includes a quiz at the end to see if you were paying attention to what you read.)
3. http://www.coldwar.me/koreanwarforkids.html (includes some links to videos of war news reels.)

Science

Need a song to reinforce this week’s memory work? Here’s a catchy one, with a nice overview of the first law of thermodynamics, along with a review of the two types of energy (covered in Week 15).

If you’re still willing to watch a Bill Nye video, he’s got an old episode out there on Energy. I thought I’d posted it back on Week 15, but apparently not:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btLU2lb3-xs

Science Project

NASA’s website is full of great information for students about the dynamics of flight. It even includes Newton’s three laws of motions in layman’s terms. https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/UEET/StudentSite/dynamicsofflight.html#forces

Speaking of NASA, this is a really neat video about the dynamics of flight. It does a great job of explaining lift, drag, weight, and thrust!

This 6th grade teacher made up a song to help his students remember the four forces that impact flight:

Again, Bill Nye’s got an old episode on the subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgsWYYubQyM

Geography

I’ve mentioned in a past week that I really think this CC mom does a great job of tying in the geography with a song and hand motions that help it all stick. Even though our community uses different music, I often find her hand motions VERY helfpul!

Once again, someone out there in CC-land was kind enough to create a geography review game. This one just includes Week 19’s geography (which is GREAT for nailing down the new information!), but don’t forget that there are several out there for other weeks, too, so if you’re trying to get a good overall review, here you go:

• Weeks 2-6
• Weeks 7-12
• Weeks 13-18

Someone raised a question on CC Connected about geography review and the suggestions that came out of that were great! (Consider this a plug for CC Connected and all the good info shared there!) One of the websites that was suggested and that looks very interesting was seterra.net. Just thought I’d pass it along in case you wanted to check it out, too.

Math

This is a flashback to previous weeks, but have you seen these awesome skip counting boards? Love this idea!!!

Fine Art

Come back tomorrow! I’ve got too much to post here, so I’m going to do a separate post on the Orchestra.

Review Games

It’s pretending to be spring here for a few days. It’s been WONDERFUL and we’ll take what we can get, but we know it’s a bluff and the cold weather is moving back in next week. So, it is CRITICAL that we spend some time outside enjoying the weather while we can! Hence the reason we took our CC review outside one afternoon this week. The kids swung on the swings while I asked them CC questions. We played a little game that they could swing as high and for as long as they wanted . . . until they missed a question. Then, they had to stop and start over again and it became the other one’s turn. I took our CC Memory Master Sticker sheets out with us and awarded stickers as we worked. It was a nice way to accomplish something we needed to work on and enjoy the weather at the same time!

One of my goals is to come up with some more active review games to use around here as the weather gets nicer. And, I keep thinking that it would be fun to get a few CC kids together one afternoon to play some review games that involved running, relays, hula hooping, or something like that. My brain is churning on it. If you have any great ideas or have seen anything out there that fits the bill, let me know!!

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