As image-bearers of God the Creator, it was all about making things this week at the Well. The Garden enjoyed painting and drawing using the projector, while the Seeds were making beautiful creations with puddles and flowers in the park. Finally, Roman structures influenced some color bridges and arches. Check them out below!

SUGGESTED AT-HOME READINGS VARY PER PROGRAM. PLEASE GO TO THE SECTION OF YOUR PROGRAM TO SEE THE SELECTED PAGES.

The Garden

Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit… John 15:5

We are learning that God wants us to live and grow close to him. Jesus’ words assure us that if we remain in Him, we will bear much fruit. We asked the students what they thought this fruit was like. Can people give bananas? Mangoes? This week we will continue to discuss what it means for us to actually produce fruit and how we can do this with our lives daily. We are teaching them that just as plants need water to live, Jesus offers us the water for our souls to grow. We love singing this truth from Psalm 1:3. “God made me/God cares for me” and “Jesus loves me, this I know,” are also favorites.

To continue illustrating our creation book, we drew some animal faces for the sixth day of creation. The students followed along as the teacher used the overhead projector to teach them how to draw the animals’ faces. They were able to draw more details if they wanted to at the end. It was a great way to practice following directions.

After the guided drawings, the students were also able to draw freely using the light projector. They experienced that what we draw on the projector is reflected large on the wall and sometimes may look backward. It’s a good way to learn about how the things we do can be reflected in the world in a big way. We should always let our light shine by doing good and bare good fruit onto others so we can be an example. On Thursday, we got to paint apples using big papers. The kids were very proud of their work.

Our stories this week were: Creation , where we learned how God is so creative and the world is like a beautiful painting.Our second story was: Does God go on vacation?, a lovely book that talks about God’s omnipresence, in an understandable and relatable way; He is always present everywhere and never takes a vacation reassuring them that they are ever alone.

The Seeds Program

During our time of worship this year, we have been leading up to the birth of Christ as told in the gospels. We have purposefully taken our time with this to communicate that there was a long time of waiting between the Old and New testaments. This week, we looked at specific prophecies told about the birth, life, death and resurrection in the Old Testament that were fulfilled in the New. It was a great way for us to see that God keeps His promises, and as we celebrate the fall biblical feasts, like the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Booths, we can be sure that the future events that these dates point to will also one day come to pass.

Happy birthday to Elena this week, who was honored with her birthday book.

BIBLE Readings

DK Illustrated Bible
- pp. 207, 208-209, 211

SCIENCE

Did you know you can “taste” a smell? Our students enjoyed this and many other fun facts as we talked about the sense of taste this week. We learned that God put sensory cells or taste buds not only on our tongues, but on our throat, cheeks, and roof of our mouth. Along with saliva that begins to dissolve the foods as well as the chemoreceptors in the olfactory bulb, taste buds send signals to the brain to tell what we are eating. One of the coolest things is to tell what parts of our tongue distinguish the different smells. The tip of the tongue detects sweet, the sides of the tongue toward the front detect salty, the sides of the tongue toward the back detect sour, the back of the tongue detects bitter, and finally the middle of the tongue detects umami flavors. Umami is the japanese word for “yummy” and it detects when a food is so good because it is a mix of flavors. The kids had fun saying the word aloud as we colored in and cut out the tongue and mouth for our diagram of the senses.

On Friday, we paused our studies of the senses to collaborate in a STEM activity with the History class. After learning about Roman arches with Mr. Jared, the students came down to the science room where we focused on the Romans being great engineers. We discussed that engineers are problem solvers that identify what needs to be fixed, who needs it to be fixed and why. They test, build and design to fix the problems they have identified. We talked about the different problems the Romans had to fix as their empire grew and then set to work making some model arches. Every student used pennies to create their own corbeled arch like the ones that people used before the Romans invented the true arch with a keystone. They had to stack the pennies and make them come together until they met in the middle. This was harder than most of them thought! Then, they collaborated to make a true arch with a “keystone” using jello and cereal boxes as well as bean cans to act like the buttress. Both groups were able to make it stand after trial and error. The kids were very excited and proud. I told the kids to try making arches with different materials at home and send me pictures of what they did. I was so happy to receive some of their pictures and we have included them in the newsletter.

Finally, before dismissal, all the students worked together to make a model arcade, or group of arches. We called it the Seeds Arcade!

History

In History class, we looked at the amazing builders that the Romans were. From the roads to the bridges they built, the Romans perfected some construction techniques that had already existed like the use of arches and mixing mortar. The kids had a great time seeing how the use of an index card in the form of an arch, provided significantly more strength to another index card that served as a bridge. We also talked about other structures like aqueducts and the sewage systems that existed in ancient Rome.

HISTORY Readings

The Roman Empire
- pp. 46-47 - Amazing Architects
- Pp. 48-49 - Feeding the Empire

The Oaks Program

Science

This week in Pre-Physics, the students shared their lab reports for the virtual lab exploring Newton's Second Law of Motion: The Law of Force, Mass, & Acceleration. They saw how adding mass to the shopping cart or using less force in the pushing of the shopping cart lowered the rate of acceleration. We also started learning about atoms and matter. After viewing a video explaining how small atoms and their subatomic particles are, the students held a marble to reinforce how small the nucleus of an atom truly is. If an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus of that atom would only be the size of a marble!

In Chemistry, the students also shared their lab reports on their virtual lab about elements, moles, and molar mass. They massed out set mole amounts of 10 mystery elements and used the periodic table to help them figure out which elements they were dealing with. And since the next chapter was a review of the mole, the students had a chance to have some free time on Thursday to either work on a periodic table puzzle, play a strategy DNA game called Splice, or try to build a model of an atom using linking cubes.

History

In our History class this week, we discussed how many of the things we use today have their roots in the Roman world. Not only are the months of the year based on Roman numbers, gods and festivals, but the days of the week find their origin in this time period as well. This was especially important to emphasize as we discussed that this was the time in history that God had chosen to send His son Jesus into the world. An unstable and dangerous time, the Messiah entered time and space and became a light in the darkness.