Week 2, day 2

Wednesdays are "Oma Day". Oma is the kids' name for my mother-in-law, and she requested that one morning a week, she could take the kids and have fun being their grandmother. They often go to the McDonald's play area, and sometimes end up at the zoo or other fun place. Today I was particularly grateful that she had the kids, because I'd been invited to an Arabic-language Bible study. Concentrating on both the kids and the Arabic would have been way too much. As it was, they say immersion is the best way to learn a language, but they don't usually talk as much about how it feels like drinking from a fire hose. Fortunately, I know I can drink from a figurative fire hose, but I did feel exhausted at the end! If I go every week, I will learn lots of Arabic, and that's my intention.

It was a rainy day, so the kids spent their morning at the shopping mall's play place. They got back around 2pm, and P's ballet lesson starts at 4pm, so that limited our school time somewhat. The rain made it easy to reach a consensus on the weather - even in Houston, the kids are unlikely to think rainy weather is also warm. Having recently experienced its results so dramatically, I was amused that today's Bible story was the Tower of Babel, when the people were made to speak different languages and couldn't collaborate on the engineering of the tower.

P did her handwriting page, and was quite willing to review the days of the week and months of the year with me as long as I made sure E didn't chime in. She's getting much better at them and needs only a little prompting. Today's assignment called for writing an invitation, but P couldn't think of anyone she wanted to invite anywhere, so we just left it. We were running low on time anyway.

E's "school" this week consists of 5 paper eggs in red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. He is first to hand me the colour I ask for, which he succeeded at today, and then once we've played that a while, I hide one and show him the other 4, and he is to name the missing colour. Except for the times that P whispered the answer, he didn't get any right. Perhaps he'll do better tomorrow.

After E's activity, we headed to the computer room for a look at Google Maps. My plan for this week is to look at the USA, so we started with the zoomed in view of our neighbourhood, and progressively zoomed out until the entire world was visible. P can reliably identify Texas on a USA map when its outline is drawn, and is pretty good at identifying the USA on a world map. She reliably identifies South Africa, Madagascar, and Australia.

Once P was settled at her ballet lesson (during which Ari and E go fishing, even in the rain), I drove to the library for some uninterrupted browsing. It's so much easier when the kids are not with me, because when they are, I have to read every book that catches their eye right away. I picked up a picture book on Texas, one on USA national monuments, and a book with various stories about the USA, a few of which I might read to them over the next few days. I also found some picture books about Canada, which we'll look at next week.

Tomorrow morning is Bible study again, but we're doing pretty well with managing to do some school in the afternoons this week, so I have good hopes.