Our Week: Turks, Comets, and Katy and the Big Snow

This week we started trying to get school started earlier. I am not a morning person and the girls sleep pretty late. Colin is always up earlier than we are. I want to get up earlier and get started with Colin. We've been getting much closer to my target time to start and it's making the day go much smoother. Now I just need to keep it up.

History

This week we learned about the Ottoman Empire. We read that some Turks would travel around entertaining with stories, songs, and dancing bears. So we made our own dancing bears.

We also learned how the Turks were able to defeat the people of Constantinople to take the city, which they renamed Istanbul. One of the things they did was to build a huge cannon.

This is the cannon Colin made following the directions in the SOTW activity guide.

Colin thought the cannon needed a little improvement so he built a Lego cover for it.

Here is the ball getting ready to be shot out of the cannon.

We also learned about Suleiman the Magnificent, who put together one set of laws for everyone to follow.

Astronomy

We learned all about comets this week. One of the things we learned is that comets are called dirty snowballs. We used cotton balls, glue, and sand to make a model of a comet's head.

We made a small ball with the cotton, put some drops of glue on it, and sprinkled it with sand to make the nucleus.

We put the nucleus inside a larger piece of cotton and rolled it into a ball. Then we put on the drops of glue and sprinkled sand again.

Model of comet's head

We read about the parts of a comet, a comet's orbit, and some famous comets. We also read Maria's Comet inspired by Maria Mitchell, America's first woman astronomer.

We also watched the coverage and the launch of space shuttle Discovery on Thursday.

Five in a Row Unit Study

Our Five in a Row book this week was Katy and the Big Snow. I've been planning it for a while waiting for some snow, but I finally decided the snow isn't coming so we went ahead and did it. We still studied snow, read lots of snow books, made paper snowflakes, had snow themed food, and made crystal snowflakes. We also did activities from the FIAR books, Snowflake Bentley and Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. I'll have more details of what we did in a separate post soon.