Week 23, day 5

Friday: Geography. It being Good Friday, I baked hot cross buns in the morning and we had a late, leisurely breakfast. Then Ari read the crucifixion account in Mark aloud to the 4 of us (B was asleep, but he wouldn't have understood it anyway). By this time it was fairly late in the morning, but we did all our review items and started on geography. We looked at the rest of Europe this week - since I don't know a whole lot about Central and Eastern Europe, and I'd like to get to the rest of the planet this year, I lumped it all together. We labelled the correct region of the Markable Map "Central and Eastern Europe", and glanced at the several atlas pages covering that region. I had found library books on Marie Curie (from Poland), a family that moved to the USA in the early part of the 20th century to escape the pogroms in Poland, and on traditional festivals in the Czech Republic, in addition to books about Poland and the Czech Republic. Since I spent 4 days in Prague while I was an exchange student in Denmark, I was able to add interesting details and personal stories to some of the pictures of the Czech Republic, so P decided to make her book about the Czech Republic. She wrote the title (we discussed how Czech spelling conventions are different from in English, and I told her about my amusement at the Czech word for ice cream: "zmrzlina" - apparently vowels play a different role in the Czech language than in English). She coloured a flag and a map I drew (showing the shape of the Czech Republic in the middle of Europe). She also drew pictures, including the Charles Bridge, a beer, a woman engraving a crystal bowl, and a castle. For dinner, we made Czech potato pancakes from a recipe in one of the books.