Challenge III Fall Week 14 Resources

Hi! If you are new to my newsletter, once a week or so I send out some general resources that I’m using with my 11th-grade high school class at Classical Conversations.  You might find them helpful in educating your student too!  I’m a little bit behind on my postings so I will be catching those up rather quickly over the next two weeks. Here are some resources for Fall Week 14.  (I don’t post something for every subject every week.)

Debate:
Moms often ask me how to grade debate. Here is one way you could do it:  Split their grade up into three parts. You can give each 33 1/3 % of the total grade: 1) preparation and research 2) prewriting of any speeches they did (grade it like an essay) 3) actual performance on the debate.  They will hopefully receive copies of their 3 judges sheets.

Philosophy:
We finished Tilt-a-Whirl’s last chapter, The Story. We summed up all we have learned from TiltaWhirl: that we are characters in God’s story and we need to live our best for Him.
We discussed Darwin/Freud.  We talked about evolution and salvation, importance of origin, picking and choosing Bible verses, Deut 4:2 and Rev 22:18-19, uniformitarianism, catastrophism, macroevolution vs. microevolution, Darwin’s 3 premises., what it means to be a citizen. These are all great topics to explore with your student.

If you have time, I’d love for you to watch this video of Marco Rubio talking about his faith. This video was especially interesting because he mentions a couple of topics we have talked about in philosophy. And pretty cool because he presents the gospel quite clearly.

Poetry/Shakespeare:
Read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me count the ways.” (Sonnet 43) p. 96 in Prescripts which has anaphora in it. What’s anaphora again?

We studied Act 2 of Macbeth.  Here’s an interesting summary of the play – the clean version. 
Ask your student who is the most manly? Lady Macbeth or Macbeth?

History:
We are now beginning to study the Reconstruction period. How hard do you think it will be for the South to recover and rejoin the Union? What is Lincoln’s 10% plan?

Chemistry:
We studied limiting reactants. We basically exploded baking soda into vinegar and caused balloons to inflate. So fun. Ask your student which reactant limited the reaction.

Mrs. N