Science & Language Arts 2026-27

last year’s Week 1 - for reference

***Remember your gardening gloves and colored pencils— we will be using these nearly every week!***

1. Book Club: — See Book Club button Once you get to the book club page, click on Tom Sawyer). Scroll to Week 1 reading & discussion question assignments.

2. Memorize the poem you chose today. Recite it to a family member or friend. Be prepared to recite it in class next week to a small group. Remember to start by saying the title and author. Example: “Fog” by Carl Sandburg

3. Bingo: Create a 5 x 5 grid for a Literary Terms Bingo (We’ll add terms in class from our literary terms and definitions each week. You’re simply getting the bingo grid ready. I recommend graph paper so you can easily draw the boxes. Or lined paper with a ruler. Make the boxes big so you can have room to write the term and a key phrase or example.)

4. Print out and bring to class

   • If you forgot to print out the Analogies Set D from WordMaster page last week, do that now.

You’re earning Excellent Learning Habits Tickets by doing this homework.

Classwork Summary

Get to know you & introductions: What are you good at or into and who else shares that apptitude or interest. We have lots of musicians and artists in our midst!

Basic FS procedures — Excellent Learning Habits tickets for homework + safety procedures Including showing them a picture of worm parasites on pig feces, the eggs of which lie dormant in any soil that has had livestock on it and which can get into humans if we fail to WASH OUR HANDS before we eat or stick our fingers in our mouth. You’re welcome, moms.

Analogies: as part of our word analysis we are beginning to review 16 types of analogies. Analogies are relationships between word pairs such as synonyms, antonyms, part:whole, user:tool, increasing intensity etc. During the first week of October we’ll get our first list of 25 challenging vocabulary words to master for the national WordMasters Challenge.

Zoology- cattle: informal introduction to Dexter cattle, the original miniature cattle breed. Our steer, Willoughby Brisket will be delivered after Thanksgiving. I touched on genetics, namely the basics of dominant and recessive alleles genes in determining whether a cow is black or brown (called dun): brown is a dilute of black and is recessive. Gave an overview of how the dwarfing allele affects bone cell growth, shortening primarily the leg bones (this allele is lethal when two of them are present- the fetus naturally aborts around 7 months of gestation). This is condition is called chondrodysplasia. Discussed what it means that Willoughby is a steer: his testicles have been removed in a process called castration and that this is done to reduce aggression in large domesticated animals such as cattle and horses. (In pigs it is done to prevent boar taint smell/taste in the meat but that is not a problem in cattle , interestingly.)

Farm Work: New Farm School students paired up with FS veterans to learn how to care for the living organisms that call Farm School home. Students worked together to feed rabbits, harvest live invertebrates from the vermiculture/compost bed to feed the fish, feed those same invertebrates, feed the chickens, trim gazanias to widen the central path, shovel mulch as bedding for the chicken coop, harvest macadamia nuts.

Book Club: The Elephant Whisperer

Poetry:

• Literary terms and definitions: sensory details, onomatopoeia, metaphor, simile, personification, stanza, rhyme scheme, alliteration, assonance, parallelism or parallel structure, concrete poems.

• Students read and analyzed Hello, Ocean by local author Pam Munoz Ryan looking for the above literary devices. This picture book is a beautiful poem about our own stretch of the Pacific Coast. Discussed how these literary devices bring layers of meaning to the work. Compared the poem to our own experiences at the beach.

• Students choose a poem to memorize for this week from a two page handout. Each week students memorize a poem and most weeks I give them a new handout with poem options for memorizing. We’ll also analyze many of these poems over the course of the year. Discussed techniques for memorizing including: reading, reciting in chunks, writing it down, quizzing self later in the day, singing it to a tune, adding actions to the words. We’ll recite this poem in class next week.

• Latin and Greek Stems: Students made flash cards for common “A” Latin and Greek roots and prefixes: auto, a/an, aster. These flash cards include mnemonic devices they created to help them memorize the meaning of each stem. Students will use these flashcards to quiz themselves.

Handouts: Literary Terms Definitions, Poems for Memorizing pages 1 & 8, Stems Flash Cards Set #1 A-D & worksheet for A-D

Coming Up in the next two weeks:

Science:

Intro to chemistry for biology— everything is made of matter, elements, mixtures vs. compounds, subatomic particles, elements predominant in living organisms.

Intro to waterfowl anatomy and physiology and raising from day old ducklings— we’ll be selecting duckling breeds

Writing: Interviewing and writing a short biograph of a classmate then delivering that bio as a speech to introduce them to the rest of the class.

Poetry: metaphor and simile

Book club: plot map and discussion of Using textual evidence to support claims.