Week 22: (MFW week 21) Robert Fulton, Floating, Juice

This week we read about Robert Fulton. We're both really enjoying learning about so many different men and women in history. I especially appreciate the difficulties these individuals endured along the way. Not all of these men and women were good at formal schooling (Eli Whitney), and many had setbacks along the way to success. One example is Robert Fulton, he thought he would have a career as an artist, but, realized that he would never be great as an artist and went on to invent the "diving boat" or submarine as we know it and also built the first "practical" steamboat. After reading "Robert Fulton - Steamboat Builder", Dario completed a notebooking page. It read: "He made the diving boat which we called a submarine. He made the first practical steamboat. He named it the Clermont. It sailed from New York City to Albany."

In Science we learned about floating and density. To go along with our "First Encyclopedia of Science" book, we also read "The Magic School Bus Ups and Downs". While reading this book, I decided to do an impromptu experiment based on one of the examples of floating found in the story. We discovered that a flat piece of bread will float, but that a wadded up piece of bread will sink...because the flat piece of bread is less dense, it will float.

Later in the week we looked at fruit and how the cells in fruit hold the juice (which is mainly made up of water...as all living things need water). We saw that oranges have larger cells and therefore hold more juice. The plum had smaller cells and was harder to squeeze, and produced less juice.

This week in English, Dario practiced using Is, Are, Was, Were, Has, and Have. These are still really tricky for him and something we need to continually practice!

This weeks writing assignment was a perfect one for Dario! Dario LOVES music, and this week we studied "joining words" and ended the week writing a paragraph about his favorite singer. He chose Jeremy Camp. This is what he wrote: "My favorite singer is Jeremy Camp. Two of my favorite songs are "The Way" and "Everlasting God". I like Jeremy Camp because I like the words to his songs. While I'm playing in my room I listen to his CD. If I met him I would give him a high five and invite him to my house for supper."

This week in Math, we added in Multiplication. He did REALLY well! He's pretty much mastered the 0, 1, 5, and 10 fact families. He continues to practice addition and subtraction and is showing improvement in the other areas he practices daily on the iPad.

Here are this weeks books.