Dancing, Math, and More

Ballet:  1 hour and 45 minutes of ballet class
Jazz: 45 minutes of jazz dance class
History: S continued to read Benjamin Franklin.
Art Study: For this week's art work, S was shown a picture of a bust of Col. Robert Shaw by Edmonia Lewis.

Composer Study: I decided to choose our composer from Wildwood Curriculum's wildwoodcurriculum.org rotation for this year.  The first term composer for 2017-2018 is Giovanni de Palestrina.  Their listing for the first piece of Palestrina's work to be listened to is Motets For Five Voices.  Seneca and I listened for the first 8 minutes and 30 seconds of the piece.  We plan to listen to more throughout the week.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQo_LirQY-k&t=508s
Poetry/Copywork: S decided on her own that she wanted to copy the poem "Trees" into her new notebook.  She copied half of it and will copy the rest hopefully tomorrow.
Math: Addition drill as we were riding in the car.  She wrote out her 2x tables in her new notebook.
Science: S continued to read from her Usborne book Sharks.  The reading was followed by an oral narration.

Narrations: I have S narrate back to me what she does in her dance classes.  She discusses floor exercises, barre work (Big Sis: "You went to the bar! S, that's illegal!), and stretches.  Narration doesn't only have to be about a reading that was done.  It's an exercise to help build memory and communication skills.
        S was so excited! She finally got to show everyone her illusion.  She has been working on learning this move all summer and she has got it down. She got to show each of her three teachers individually.  They all said what a great job she did.  She learned to do it by watching a tutorial on youtube, and she has the flexibility from intense dance training to be able to learn the move.
        You may have noticed that S's math assignment is below what is typically done in fifth grade math.  We used the approach of delayed formal mathematics.  That doesn't mean that she hasn't been doing math.  She did use a math curriculum for first grade, but not after that.  Instead, we played math games, read books about math, and taught math concepts as fun sporadic lessons.  I decided to approach math this way after reading this article https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-school about a community in 1929 that removed math from its elementary school curriculum until sixth grade.  Now, I think it is very important that we acknowledge that kids at that time were more likely to be exposed to more real-world math through things like knitting (patterns, patterns in multiples of 3s or 4s), woodworking, farming, cooking with scales for measurements, etc.  S has learned math concepts and she has done work on long addition and subtraction with borrowing and carrying, but this is her first year to really approach memorizing her math facts.  She actually has a lot already memorized just from doing gentle math over the past few years.