Week 17, day 4

We didn't do school yesterday, because the kids went to the zoo with their grandmother and got back later than usual, just as the baby needed to nurse for a good half hour, by which time the kids were involved in another activity that looked like it was more worthwhile than 45 minutes of stressed-out school would be.

Bible (Catechism, Bible story, memory verse): We finished our review of the catechism questions and memory verses learned so far, and read about the Transfiguration.

Calendar (Update day of week and date of month, record weather and temperature): I let the kids play on the swings once we'd observed the weather, and used that time to nurse the baby, so this segment of school took longer than usual. When the kids got inside, I read them a chapter of "Pippi Longstocking" - this was one of my favourite books as a kid.

Handwriting: P wrote 2 days ago's sentence from dictation. She did pretty well - she really has a good grasp of basic phonics.

Language Arts: P read her reader fluently. There was a "story sequencing" activity, where she needed to put an out-of-order story into the correct order. She totally aced this. At the beginning of the year, she struggled and whined, but now she had no problem at all. It's so neat to see her learning!

E's "school": This didn't happen today, as he wandered off in boredom while I was doing P's language arts and he seemed to be happily occupied in play downstairs when I was going to do his activity with him. Play is important for learning, too, especially for a 3-year-old. (ALMOST FOUR, as he'll emphatically remind anyone who mentions his age). He did announce at lunch, "A quintillion bytes is an exobyte!". I think Ari told him this a few days ago, and he remembered it perfectly.

Math (5-a-day, other activities): P informed me yesterday that her favourite part of school is math, and she loves doing her 5-a-days. I guess I succeeded in revamping how I was setting them up. She has really gotten the hang of putting together and counting coins - I asked her to make 42 cents using as few coins as possible, and she grabbed, in order, a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and 2 pennies. It's really satisfying to see how much she's learned.

Geography and/or science: We didn't do this today; I plan on spending much of tomorrow looking at our library book and pictorial calendar of Norway and having P make a book about it.

Other: I showed P how to put her right hand with thumb on C and remaining fingers on the adjacent keys so that she can play C, D, E, F, G. She did this really well. I didn't try to offer E the opportunity, because he was busy playing elsewhere and I don't want to push it and make him lose interest. After dinner, B would NOT go to sleep (and he was clearly exhausted), so I put him in the mei tai (baby carrier) and played Brahms' Rhapsody in G Minor - it totally conked him out. He didn't mind the mistakes induced by my hands hitting him en route to the correct key. Unfortunately, once I transferred him to his crib, he only slept another 10 minutes or so. Bah.