Week 26, day 5 and Week 27, day 1

Friday: Geography. We learned about China. I was able to find two library books at about my children's listening level. After we located China on the Markable Map, we read "The Ivory Wand" from Stories from Around the World and "The King's Hawk" from the Children's Book of Virtues. We looked at the children's atlas page for China, and read our library books. After lunch P made a book with the flag, a map which I traced, and pictures of the Great Wall of China, a panda, Chinese New Year (with a dragon puppet), lots of people, and a person eating rice with chopsticks. For dinner I made a ginger-garlic tofu stir-fry and sweet-sour cabbage with rice. Yum!

Monday: Language Arts. We played another hundred chart game today as part of P's 5-a-day review. This time, instead of simply saying the number she had to colour to make a pictue (a sailboat), I had her count beans. I had prepared bean sticks - popsicle sticks with 10 beans glued to each of them - as well as a hundred flat composed of 10 popsicle sticks glued together, and used combinations of these and individual beans to have her count what number she had to colour in. She found it a bit tedious, but began to recognize patterns ("57 is in the 5 row and the 7 column"). You can see that I'm enough of a math geek that I sneak extra math into the days that aren't officially math days. Hopefully this will rub off on my kids and they'll love it too.

The language arts component of the day went smoothly. P is becoming easier to reassure that she will be able to do various assignments. I'm really glad I bought the Sonlight language arts curriculum, because by myself I know I'd be pushing her too hard and she'd be constantly frustrated with me and herself. When reading her reader, she saw that one of the pages had 2 sentences on it instead of the usual 1, and complained until I told her to just do one at a time, whereupon she did it perfectly. She was also supposed to sort a stack of 12 words by subject (emotion words, names, body parts, clothing items), an activity that we did last week and she struggled with it. She informed me that she didn't want to do it, then agreed to try if I helped her as much as she needed. She then did the assignment with no help at all, and finally declared, "That was fun!" We read a chapter of Little House on the Prairie, and P dictated a report of how life would be different if she lived at the same time as Laura and Mary. The chapter had described how they did their laundry while camping with their covered wagon, and P's report mainly focused on how a mother would solve the problem of a child playing outside and getting dirty. Now that it's properly summer, this is an experience she and I have quite often, but she knew that back then the "just go put it all in the washing machine" solution wouldn't have worked. I feel like she's expressing herself more clearly and systematically than she did at the beginning of the school year.