Hello everyone,

Michaelmas added a beautiful extra day to last week, it was nice seeing the students back at the Wessling’s farm.

Thanks to Heidi Schoen for getting the school a membership with The Restaurant Depot – that will keep costs for Pentathlon Pizza’s down.  Thanks also to Rick Majzun for making contact with the 4/5 class at the Nairobi Waldorf School, we’ll work on our first pen pal letters to them this week.

In main lesson we worked on ratios and spent quite a bit of time reviewing factoring whole numbers and a little bit of time reviewing long division.  This week’s homework will have factoring, long division and ratio word problems.

This week’s spelling words are:  Intersecting – Opposite – Adjacent - Radius – Area – Observe – Height.  The challenge words are: Parallelogram and Circumference.

In this week’s main lessons some geometry terms will be introduced and we’ll be working on areas of rectangles, parallelograms, triangles and circles.  We’ll need to know about Pi, so we’ll estimate it with clay, sticks and string – just like the Babylonians did.  Last time I led a class in this exercise, we averaged 25/8, the same number the Babylonians used and just about half a percent off our modern approximation.

Speaking of Babylon, we closed out the week with clay modeling of Gilgamesh and Enkidu grappling.  The children were paired up, everyone made only one character and there were no assignments of who made which.  The modeling eventually turned out quite good but what was really remarkable was how well the pairs worked together.  I didn’t hear any arguments but did hear quite a bit of collaboration.

It was a really nice week overall,

Steve