Week 13, day 5

Bible (Catechism, Bible story, memory verse): We reviewed John 3:16 and our most recent catechism questions. These deal with sin and how sin deserves the wrath and curse of God, so I explained to the kids that that's the bad news, but John 3:16 tells the good news - Jesus took the curse on the cross, and when we believe in him we can have life forever instead of getting what we deserve. We also read the story of Jonah, both in the Bible storybook and a Peter Spier picture book adaptation (which I conditionally recommend: the pictures and story stick close to the original text but in the back there's "additional information" including a more liberal date for and attitude toward the book of Jonah than respect for the Bible justifies. We discussed the pictures - a map and a diagram of a ship of Tarshish - and I didn't read any of the comments aloud).

Calendar (Update day of week and date of month, record weather and temperature): E really excels at identifying the date on the calendar, and P is doing pretty well at telling time to the nearest minute when I walk her through it.

Handwriting: Paul, look for a pair of Christmas cards from your niece and nephew in however long it takes a standard letter to reach Canada at this time of year. E traced his name (though he couldn't see what he was tracing and formed the letters as well as he could remember instead, which turned out surprisingly well) and P wrote a few sentences.

Language Arts: We played the picture matching game, where the kids place various pictures on the letter card corresponding to their initial letter. P has no trouble with this, and E just needed help finding the letters sometimes - he could easily identify whether a given letter was right or wrong once he'd found it.

Math (5-a-day, other activities): Again, P got frustrated when I included counting money involving a dime and a quarter. She's been able to do this readily in the past, but it's been a problem the last few days. I may change up the 5-a-day again, using scanned coins for her to count and letting her trace the same ones if she wants to trace something, instead of making her come up with the right number of coins.

We played the coin matching game, this time with various numbers of nickels to practice skip-counting by 5s. E does this almost perfectly, and P is at about the same level as he is but doesn't like it and resists.

Earlier in the day, we did more measuring. The kids put their chairs on the table, and we measured together that the table alone was 41 cm high and the chair alone was 26 cm high. I showed P how to do the addition problem on the whiteboard, and we confirmed together that the chair on the table was 67 cm high just as our sum predicted. Later on, when I found out that standard postage to Canada is 75 cents, I showed the kids how to add the values of two standard stamps, which came to more than 75 cents, so we knew that 2 stamps would be enough.

E's "school": We read a number of stories and poems, including "Leo the Late Bloomer," "A Baby Sister for Frances," and "Baby Says" from the Harper Collins Treasury of Picture Book Classics. P tried to read the words in "Baby Says" (there are only 7 unique words), but they don't follow the phonics rules we've covered so far (Uh oh, no, okay, baby) so I had to help her out quite a bit. She started to recognize some of them by the end. We discussed some of the ways life might change once our baby is born - I may not have as much time to do some of the things they're used to, our school might be interrupted if the baby cries in the middle, etc.