Week 13, day 3

Bible (Catechism, Bible story, memory verse): We reviewed John 3:16 and read about the handwriting on the wall.

Calendar (Update day of week and date of month, record weather and temperature): This whole telling time thing is a little beyond P, and I think I succeeded in intimidating her by asking her to do it on her 5-a-day a few days ago, because she seems confused now. When we record the temperature and the time the temp was taken, I go through how we figure out the time step by step. (Where is the hour hand pointing? What hour is it? Where is the minute hand pointing? Let's count the minutes together - do you want to count by 5s or by 1s?). If I leave out any of the hand holding, she gets upset. Clearly, this means that she's not ready for me to leave any of the steps out, so I need to be reliable to help her with all of them for the next little while.

Handwriting: I gave P a page of "a"s to copy, since she was tempted to do them wrong on Tuesday. She completed all the lowercase "a"s and they looked good.

Language Arts: P traced the second sentence for the week, re-read the reader, and we played a game where for each letter we've learned, the kids took turns naming a food that started with that letter. E really enjoyed coming up with different kinds of meat: turtle meat, alligator meat, penguin meat, fox meat, etc. I tried to get him to identify foods he's actually tasted, but at least he proved that he's fully grasped the concept.

Math (5-a-day, other activities): P got through her 5-a-day slowly, after a few threats about how if she pretended to be asleep instead, I'd have to assume that she was sick and couldn't go to ballet. This problem wasn't restricted to math; she tried it repeatedly during just about every subject. I didn't let her get away with it, and she did all her work well once she actually did it.

E's "school": This didn't happen. It was too cloudy to look at our shadows outside, which was the main other thing from SSGMR I'd planned, and I left to take P to ballet before we had time to read any storybooks. Perhaps I ought to switch around our schedule some, by putting a read-aloud between handwriting and language arts or before math, to give him more direct attention. I'll mull this over and perhaps try it next week.

Geography and/or science: We looked at my picture book about Bamble, a region in Norway. The book is full of beautiful pictures, mainly featuring seaside towns and winter scenes. I explained what fjords were by drawing an outline of Norway on our whiteboard, and then erasing bits of the coastline and drawing jagged inlets into each erased bit. It was a bit more dramatic than the real map, but the kids readily saw that Norway has a lot of coastline because of the fjords.

When I first received this book in 2001, I was amazed to see that one of the pictures was of an area whose name was the same as my mother's maiden name. The picture's caption stated that the land in that area had been farmed for over 5000 years. Never having lived more than 4 1/2 years in one place (though I have now lived in the USA for almost 8 straight years, which explains why I'm getting stir-crazy), I found it incredible to have a photo of a place where I have 5000-year-old roots. I tried to explain to the kids why I liked this photo so much, but they were way too young to grasp the concept of "rootedness". I guess it is kind of abstract.

Other: I took P to ballet while Ari and E used their underwater camera housing to film sunfish eating bacon. They got some awesome close-up footage of several sunfish stripping their bait wire clean. I guess this counts as "science".