Week 24

This week was a get-back-on-track week!   Only three more weeks until spring break! So I put together a list of lessons that have to get done before then, and we’ve been moving through it.  
In history we moved into our study of the Age of Exploration.  



In The Almanac of World History, we read about the Spanish Conquest of the New World.  I-E and E-R took notes which next week will be organized into an outline, so a report can be written. 



Both girls read and summarized chapters 1-3 of Around the World in a Hundred Years.



In The Usborne Book of Explorers we read about Ibn Battuta and created a map chronicling his journeys through Africa and the Middle East. 



The girls were able to draw their maps from memory—thanks to Mapping the World by Art!  I love it when what was learned comes in handy!

History Portfolios had a map to complete that covered the Major Trade Routes C 1000-1400.



Mapping the World by Art has conveniently prepared us for our studies of The Age of Explorations by introducing John Cabot, Vasco da Gama, and Amerigo Vespucci.   This week though we moved to China and learned about Zheng He.   If you aren’t up on what kind of naval power the Chinese had between 1300 and 1500, you may want to check out this video: 

which compares one of Columbus’ ships with China's ships during the Mongol’s  reign.  Pretty amazing stuff!   I-E and E-R worked on drawing Southeast Asia which was explored by Zheng He. 

English this week brought further study of pronouns.   We continued with personal pronouns and added demonstrative pronouns.  Rod and Staff’s writing this week covered organizing your notes.  I didn’t think we really needed this lesson, but turns out we did!    So something else added to our list of writing skills.  Next week we will study this skill with our history notes.
  
We started two read aloud books (at booksshouldbefree.com )—Our Island Story and The Three Musketeers
. 
Math brought our Pi Day Celebration.   And our Singapore math lined up perfectly as we studied Area of a Circle.
  
We had a full and busy week—just what we needed!

Pi Day Celebration!

Fact:  Pi is commonly referred to as 3.14.
We’ve been celebrating Pi Day for several days now.     This year it happened to fall right on the week we are studying circles!   How perfect is that?  (E-R says it would be more perfect, if we happened to be working on page 314 in our grammar books!)

We’ve listened to Mathematical Pi quite a few times---love its catchy tune.

A long, long time ago. Long before the Super Bowl!

As well as this amazing video

What the number Pi sounds like when translated into music---pretty awesome!

Fact:  Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day in 1879.
We started out our week with reading Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi. 

It was silly and a bit young for I-E and E-R, but I enjoyed it!   And it did an excellent job creating a visual picture of how pi is used to determine the circumference of a circle. 
Fact:  In the Star Trek episode—Wolf in the Fold—Spook fools the evil computer by telling it to compute to the last digit of Pi.
Next we tried to figure out how to determine the area of a circle.We knew that an area of a rectangle is determined by multiplying length by width, so we cut out our circles and tried to put them together into a rectangle.

Cutting the circle into fourths didn’t work.    

Neither did cutting it into squares.

 

 

 

Cutting it into very small pizza slices almost allowed us to form a rectangle.

By taking the one of those pizza slices and cutting it in half, we finally were able to form our rectangle.   And we could then see that 1/2 of the circumference times the radius equals the area of a circle.   Since the circumference of a circle is determined by multiplying 1/2 the diameter by pi by the radius of the circle, the area of a circle can be determined by multiplying pi by radius squared.  
Fact: At position 763 there are six nines in a row.  This is known as Feynman Point.

The Joy of Pi (which showcases the first million digits of pi) is an informative read.   Inspired by the chapter on memorizing pi, I-E and E-R wrote their own piems. 
And I said, “A black pineapple at living magic dot com/dragon/sentence composing someone dot gentlemen.

and

See I need a below classroom to remake songs for women.  
It was hard!   
Fact:  Chao Lu of China holds the world record for most memorized digits of Pi---67,890.
After reading several chapters on the history of pie, we created this timeline book
. 

Fact:  There is no occurrences of the sequence 123456 in the first million digits of Pi.

We tried out Buffon’s Needle Problem.

Drew parallel lines. 

Dropped our baguettes (toothpicks)

Figured, figured, and figured some more.

One of the two experiments we completed did work out to 3.17.   Perhaps Lord Buffon was on to something, or perhaps he just had too much time on his hands! 

A Pi Banner was created

and proudly hung.

Notice the decimal point!

Representing Pi to the 207th digit, the girls plan to use the banner to memorize lots of Pi.

Fact:  In 2002, a Japanese scientist found 1.24 trillion digits of pi using a powerful computer called the Hitachi SR 8000, breaking all previous records

We also created Pi plates in anticipation of the pumpkin pie we plan to make for supper!

Fact: The height of an elephant from foot to shoulder is equal to 2 times pi times the diameter of the elephant’s foot!

A friend made this awesome Pi tee-shirt to celebrate Pi day!

Be sure to link up your Pi celebrations to .Celebrate Pi Day