Special Notices to Parents:

The school year consists of twenty-eight lessons and seven examinations. 

Each lesson covers five subjects - Language Arts, Mathematics, Social Science, Science and Fine Arts.

Trent sends an examination on five subjects  for each student after every fourth lesson.  Elementary students have various short projects during the year.  Students in the seventh grade through the twelfth grade have year long projects.  High school students must write three five-paragraph essays each year. 

The Trent Schools maintains student records and transcripts and makes them available to other schools or colleges upon your request.

This sample lesson is provided for your information only.   This lesson is protected by copyrights and permission to copy or duplicate it in any form must be obtained by written application to The Trent Schools.

The Trent School
Grade Seven -- Lesson Nine

This is work for five to ten days. Introduce the material in this lesson at the pace most reasonable for your student.

Vocabulary

Look up these words in the dictionary and note that they have more than one meaning. Write a sentence for each word using the various meanings.

ambidextrous
idiom
proclivity
blatant
infidelity
tariff
expound
literate
pathos
pervade

Writing

Effective word choice will make your writing more interesting, colorful and precise. The following exercise will help you find specific words. You will go from the general to the specific.

Example:

Plant--- flower--- rose--- American Beauty

You fill in the blanks in your writing file.

Plant _____ ______ spruce

Plant _____ ______ _____

Example:

Person--- female--- relative--- Aunt Sue

You fill in the blanks.

Person _____ ______ basketball guard

Person _____ _____ ________

Grammar

Most statements begin with the subject.

Loggers cut special trees.

Questions often begin with part of the verb.

Are some trees too small?

To locate the subject in a question, rearrange the words to form a statement.

Some trees are too small.

The predicate also precedes the subject in statements beginning with There is, There are, Here is or Here are.

There are environmental laws.

In commands the subject is not stated.

Plant these seedlings. (You is understood)

Find the subject in the following sentences and add them to your grammar file.

The production of clean timber takes several years.

Lumber companies buy large amounts of timber.

Some simple procedures protect the conditions of the forest.

Do plants sprout easily in the region?

There are many helpful agricultural advances.

Literature

John Steinbeck and The Red Pony

John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) was born in the Salinas Valley of California where he acquired his love of the outdoors. Like Jody, the main character of The Red Pony, Steinbeck loved horses. The day that his horse had a colt, Steinbeck said, was 'the most tremendous morning in the world." During holidays from school, Steinbeck worked as a hired hand and learned firsthand about life on a ranch.

Steinbeck gained worldwide praise not only for The Red Pony (1937) but also for several other novels. Among them are Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and The Pearl (1947). In 1962 Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech he said that a writer must "celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love." In many ways the boy Jody has all of these virtues.

The Red Pony covers about two years in the life of a young boy on an isolated ranch. The novel is divided into three chapters. Each chapter deals with a separate incident in the boy's growth. In the first he is given a young pony. In the second he meets a mysterious old man. In the third he learns to care for a mare about to give birth to a colt. Each incident tests Jody and helps him discover new things about the world in which he must live.

For the next four lessons, you will be reading and thinking about John Steinbeck’s novel, The Red Pony. . Read the first part of chapter one and notice how the characters are described.

How are Carl Tiflin and Bully Buck alike? How are they different?

What does Jody feel about his routine daily chores? Why do you suppose he smashes the green muskmelon?

Why do you think Jody’s father gives him the pony? In what ways does Jody show his feelings about his new pony?

Describe Jody before he has the pony. Does he change after he receives Gabilan?

Geography

Regional Focus

The United States and Canada are huge countries. Together they reach from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the coast of Mexico in the south. West to east, they stretch from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean. The United States and Canada - with Mexico - form the continent of North America.

The Land

Place

Climate and Vegetation

The vast size of landforms affects climate, soils, and vegetation in the United States and Canada. The forests and flatlands in far northern Canada and Alaska have short, cool summers and long, cold winters. The Pacific coast from southern Alaska to northern California has a mild, humid climate. Mist-covered forests and lush green plants cover this area. Pacific mountain ranges keep ocean rain clouds from reaching inland areas. Just east of the mountains lie the only deserts in the region.

Waterways  

The Mississippi River is the largest river system in North America. It flows from near the United States-Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. The Missouri River, the Ohio River, and their tributaries merge into the Mississippi River system. The largest lake system is the Great Lakes - Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario. The waters of these five lakes are interconnected and eventually meet with the St. Lawrence River, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Great Plains  

The Great Plains has a humid continental climate of cold winters and hot summers. This region receives rain from the Gulf of Mexico and the far north. Before settlers arrived in the 1800s, grasses covered much of the Great Plains. Now the land is covered with farms and cities.

Other Areas  

The Northeast region of the United States and Canada has the same climate as the Great Plains. Most of the southern states, however, are in a humid subtropical region that experiences mild winters. Only the tip of Florida is far enough south to have a tropical climate. The Hawaiian Islands - the only other area of the United States with a tropical climate - lie 2,400 miles (3,862 k) from the United States mainland in the Pacific Ocean.

The Chesapeake Bay Watershed
Browse The Chesapeake Bay Watershed Web site at http://www.chesapeakebay.net/wshed Write an editorial for The Trent School Owl based on your findings. (no, Trent doesn't really have a school newspaper.) Your editorial should include information describing the current state of the Bay and efforts to clean it up. Also, describe steps that online students can take to help "Save the Bay." Be sure to include a map of the Chesapeake Bay area. Have your at-home or Online Teacher act as your editor.

Mathematics

In your last lesson, you learned how to find the area of a rectangle. The material in this lesson is directly related to what you learned in your last lesson. You've studied perimeters in past grades, but this time we are going to ask you to put on your mathematics thinking cap and get ready to do a few calculations.

For a start, if you had to chase your dog, sister, brother, or a wild elephant around the house six times, how far would you run? (Note: It is not a good idea to chase wild elephants.)

Take me to Perimeters.

Science

Biotic and Abiotic Factors: Organisms and Their Environments

In this lesson you shall learn about pH factors and acid rain.

NatureNet:  The National Park Service’s Natural Resource Place on the Web http://www.aqd.nps.gov/natnet/ Visit Nature Net, the park service’s website. How does the National Park Service monitor air and water quality in the nation’s parks? How does it monitor the status of plants and animals?

Take me to the pH and Acid Rain lesson and experiment.

Fine Arts

Music

Great Composers

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

1840-1893

Go to the music page on Tchaikovsky to learn his style and to experience his genius. On that page, click on each of the following works. You shall be required to identify only one Tchaikovsky piece, his Piano Concerto No.1 in B Flat Minor.

Piano concerto No.1 in B Flat minor
1812 Overture
Capriccio Italien, Op.45
Swan Lake "Prelude"
Nutcracker Suite, Op.71a - Waltz of the Flowers
Romeo and Juliet - Overture

The eminent Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in a settlement in the Ural Mountains of Russia. The first mention of his involvement with music appears in a letter of 1844 that reports him as having helped compose a song, "Mama's in Petersburg." At home he heard folk songs, popular arias, and romances sung by his mother, and pieces played by a mechanical organ, among them excerpts from Mozart's Don Giovanni. (Mozart would remain Tchaikovsky's most beloved composer.) Piano lessons, started about the age of five, continued in Saint Petersburg, where he entered boarding school in 1848.


From 1850 to 1859 while attending school, he assisted in a choir conducted by Gavriil Lomakin and studied piano. Assigned on graduation to the Ministry of Justice, Tchaikovsky continued to be drawn to music, and in 1861 he began classes sponsored by the Russian Music Society. The year after, he left his job and entered the just-founded Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Working zealously under Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Zaremba, he received a Silver Medal for his graduation cantata.

Tchaikovsky taught theory in Moscow, joining the faculty of the new Moscow Conservatory when it opened in September 1866. During his 11 years there, he composed his Piano Concerto no. 1 (1875), the ballet Swan Lake (1876), four operas, three symphonies, and many smaller works.

Marriage in July 1877, to Antonina Miliukova triggered an emotional crisis that brought him near suicide. He fled Moscow in a state of turmoil but managed to finish three masterpieces--the Fourth Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and the opera Eugene Onegin--before May 1878, when his wife agreed to separation (they were never divorced). An annuity granted during his crisis, allowed him to quit (1878) teaching. From 1878 to 1885, Tchaikovsky lived sometimes in Russia, sometimes in western Europe. His reputation grew with the Capriccio Italien (1880), the 1812 Overture (1880). During his last years he lived in or near Moscow. In 1888 Tsar Alexander III granted him a yearly pension.

Tchaikovsky's fame, as both conductor and composer, spread as the result of a series of international tours, which brought him to the United States in 1891. He continued to compose--the ballets Sleeping Beauty (1889) and Nutcracker (1892), the Fifth (1888), Sixth (1893), and Manfred (1885) Symphonies, and three final operas, including the powerful and theatrical The Queen of Spades (1890). Younger composers emulated him, among them Sergei Rachmaninoff. On Nov. 6, 1893, a few days after conducting the premier of his Sixth Symphony, Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg. Although it was reported that he died of cholera, some scholars now believe that his death was in fact a suicide.

Tchaikovsky's lyric gift owes much to Russian folk song, which he quotes or imitates, and to the 19th-century Russian salon song, whose traits permeate his vocal melody and even infuse his instrumental themes . The expressive pathos of his themes depends on abundant use of suspensions and anticipations, which also pervade his rich harmonies.

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