Week 14, day 4

Bible (Catechism, Bible story, memory verse): We reviewed a few verses and catechism questions, and read about the shepherds and the wise men.

Calendar (Update day of week and date of month, record weather and temperature): It was almost warm, and sunny. Yippee! Eventually, sogginess becomes tiresome.

Handwriting: I did wet-dry-try on the board with P for the numbers 5 and 6. Hopefully this will help her remember how to form them when she's doing her 5-a-days.

Language Arts: P wrote yesterday's sentence from dictation, and read her reader with ease. The schedule had me hum tunes the kids knew and ask them to identify them. Since neither child can remotely carry a tune, I was skeptical about whether this would work, but P found it fairly easy. So her inability to carry a tune is separate from an inability to hear a tune, which is interesting.

Math (5-a-day, other activities): On Thursday morning, E asked if we could count to a trillion. When Ari heard me explain to him that we couldn't, but a computer could, he offered to program his linux box to count to a trillion. The computer took about 20 hours to count to almost a trillion by ones (some kind of floating point error caused it to count to a trillion minus 2^12), displaying every 100,000th number (because printing out numbers takes the computer much longer than counting them). This was highly entertaining. We then asked it to count to a trillion and a half, which it is still doing, but it's gotten past a trillion and thus the objective has been achieved. The kids have learned that computers can count much, much faster than people can.

I asked P to make 30 cents using 4 coins, and then using 2 coins. She did both of these instantly, hardly having to think about it at all. It's amazing how much easier this sort of thing as become for her over the past few months.

E's "school": We read "Thumbelina" from Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales and "What Happens To Your Food" from The Usborne Flip-Flap Body Book. E wanted to repeat yesterday's SSGMR activity, so I let him trace around a small book, trace the pencil line with a marker, colour in the rectangle, and cut it out. He was quite pleased with the result; his scissor skills are pretty good for 3 years old.

Geography and/or science: We looked at the pictures in the book about Denmark, and I talked about some of my experiences as an exchange student there. The book was quite long, so by the time we had finished reading it, the kids had no attention span left for any other geography-type books.

Other: We're done with school for 2009! I don't plan on doing any more until the first week of January; there is plenty going on around here for the next few weeks. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Since the baby's due date is February 3rd (but both P and E were born before their due dates), I don't know how much school will happen during January. I plan to take a couple of weeks off once the baby is born. Hopefully P and E will get to see much of the (home)birth, and that will count as science for several weeks!