Weekly Wrap UP 5/2518-- Martinez, Caesar, Public school ends

The last artist we will be studying this year is Maria Martinez who is a Native American artist.  The project was to work on 3D art and learn about pottery.  While Meet the Masters only had one project, a pinch pot.  I as usual added to it.

While this artist is famous for making her pots it was actually her husband who painted them.  We never could find out why he wasn't given as much credit for the pots.

First the boys made coil pots

then a pinch pot

We had to let the pots dry before we could paint them which we did the following week.

we encouraged the boys to try to do Indian designs but we were flexible and they boys came up with their own designs

Sample of my pots 

MarioFans pot

We are getting to do one more art projects next week--weaving baskets.  I thought it would be a fun project to end the year with!


This year the boys covered 15 different artist, learning about their art, style and the personal history of each artist.  We are hoping to work together next year and chose more artists to introduce the boys too, since this year was a great success in learning art on a weekly basis!!


For our last Literature book of the school year we are reading the play Julius Caesar! there are so many books out there but after looking at several of them we chose this version as it had lots of notations that help us understand the play

We are expecting this to be our last book of the school year for our Literature class!

 I am not an expert on Shakespeare and this type of reading is pretty hard for the boys.  So we have been pulling lots of resources together to help them learn about the play and the type of writing it is in.  Here are some of the resources we have found that has helped us in our lesson planning.

Before beginning we listened to this video



I also had the kids listen to this video which gives a synopsis of the play



At home we are listening to an audio version of the book as we are following along.  Stopping whenever we need to look something up to better understand the passage.

After each scene we go and watch a video clip that helps to explain the scene and some of the nuances that we might have missed



After we have read the scene and understand what the characters are saying and doing we are watching the movie scene.  I stop the movie at the point of where we have finished reading.  It may seem a bit disjointed but we plan to watch the movie again all the way though once the book is completed.  I am finding this helps with the understanding of the play.



Lastly we are having the boys fill in a question work sheet for each act, again hoping to get the boys to better understand the play.  I found these questions free at this site.

MarioFan has completed his Science for the year.  We finished Evolution and this semester have been concentrating on human evaluation.  We are going to take a short break on science and then we will do some more hand on activities as MarioFan prefers science experiments and he feels this past semester, science has been lacking in that area.  Hard to recreate a lab on this evolution!

Firedrake had her finals this week for her three classes in public school.  Since we ended the semester with all A's she once again was allowed to drop one final exam.  She chose to drop Algebra final this semester!  She is still working on a few subjects at home but should be wrapping things us shortly.