WWS Week 7

[naturalmom]

This is the Topos in Week 7 of WWS1, written by my 12yos.  Is it fairly on track?

 

       Before the 1600’s most people believed one of two ideas about planetary motion.  Most astronomers believed Geocentrism, which says that the earth is the center of the solar system.  The rest believed the teachings of Copernicus, which states that the sun is the center of the solar system, and that all orbits are circular.  This belief is called Heliocentrism.

 

       Johannes Kepler was the assistant of Tycho Brahe. They both believed in Heliocentrism, but could not use circular orbits to explain why Mars travels at different speeds at different times. After working on this for awhile Brahe became sick and told Kepler to continue working on Mars’s orbit alone, right before he died in 1601. As the years went by, Kepler kept on trying to understand the orbit of Mars. He tried 40 different equations that he thought might explain Mars’s movements, but none of them worked.

 

       Finally, in 1605, he figured out that Mars’s orbit must be elliptical and stated, “The planetary orbit is elliptical and the sun, the source or movement, is at one of the foci of this ellipseâ€. This statement sums up Kepler’s first law of planetary motion. He published his findings in Astonomia Nova, wanting to prove to other astronomers that all planets travel in elliptical orbits, and that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the solar system.

[Chrysalis Academy]

Absolutely! I think it is on track for sure.  You have good paragraphing & topic sentences, a good chronological progression, complete sentences, a quote nicely incorporated.  That is absolutely on track for where you are in the program.

 

Do trust the rubrics at the end of each lesson.  They help you stay on track as a teacher, too, and help you not to expect too much too soon.  They remind you what your student has been taught to date and is expected to apply.  

[naturalmom]

Whew!  My son is finding it VERY challenging, but is also enjoying it a lot because he feels a sense of accomplishment when he completes a TOPOS.  It takes him a long time to finish it.  I am really glad that he is on track with this: we started the year doing 2 days/week, and have moved to 3 days/week.  He does it independently, and then I check the work.  I plan to keep it at 3 days/week until he finishes WWS1, and then we will take a break to do a semester of something else before beginning WWS2.