Week 20, day 2

Tuesday: Science. Today went much better than yesterday, thank God. Today's theme at Titmouse Club was "backyard gardening", which basically turned out to be what sorts of things you might find in your back yard. They had live bess beetles, stick insects, and millipedes for the kids to look at, and talked about how seeds grow into plants. The "craft" involved planting seeds in a cup of soil. We haven't watered them yet, so the seeds aren't likely to start growing until we do. Some of the seeds were milkweed, so we might transfer them outside if they get big enough and try to raise monarch butterflies. On the nature walk, there were 5 turtles sunning themselves - 4 in a straight line on one log, all looking in the same direction, and one on a separate log that found the approach of a dozen or so preschoolers intimidating and swam off with alacrity. Spring has decidedly arrived; the insects think so anyway.

Once home, we did all our review (P asked to learn the 2nd AND 3rd verses of "Holy, Holy, Holy") and it went smoothly. P's reader this week features Nat the "nightingale" (unrecognizable as such due to its cartoon nature) who lies down and naps on the job, to the chagrin of his porcupine boss. Recently, P has been attempting to get out of schoolwork by lying on the floor or under the table or on her bed and "napping". ("I can't put up 'Tuesday' on the calendar because I'm asleep.") After P had read, "Nat has a nap. Nat is bad.", I asked her whether napping during school time was any better. On the following page, in which "Nat's boss is mad", she decided it was a good thing I wasn't a porcupine, since she'd been doing the same thing as Nat had. I was amused. I think I was a porcupine yesterday, but today I was more of an owl (somewhat stern, with glasses, and mostly keeping my tone of voice to gentle hoots - maybe even wise, I hope).

My planned science experiment for today had involved planting seeds, and since the kids did that already at Titmouse Club, I decided to take us all to Space Center Houston instead (which I had planned on doing within the next 9 days while E is still 3 and thus gets in free). There is a 1:10,000,000,000 scale model of the solar system, with the sun the size of a grapefruit, and Earth slightly larger than a millimeter in diameter, with about 0.2 miles from the Sun to Neptune. We walked from the Sun to Saturn before going into the museum, but then both big kids had desperate potty needs so we went inside instead of continuing to Uranus and Neptune. We looked inside the Shuttle mockup and at the Space Shuttle Main Engine again, and I talked about how fuel needs oxygen to burn, but there isn't any oxygen in space so the Shuttle carries its own oxidizer. Once home after dinner, I performed a demo to show that fire needs oxygen, by lighting candles and then putting a glass over them so we could see the flames die down and go out once the oxygen was consumed. Most of the rest of the time at the Space Center the kids spent in the large, elaborate play structure getting lots of exercise. When they kicked us out at 5pm, we walked from Saturn to Pluto (they've relabeled it as "not a planet", but I'm sure the original display was made before Pluto's demotion). Seeing the scale of the orbits relative to the sizes of the planets is really amazing, as is considering that the Sun's gravity is strong enough from so far away to keep the planets orbiting it. I don't know if the kids understood the reason for my awe, but at least I communicated, "Mommy thinks science is really cool." Which is totally true (you'd hope so, since I spent 5 years earning a planetary science degree from Caltech).

Week 20, day 1

Monday: Language Arts. One Of Those Days. Rain. Reluctance. Irritability. It's hard to get a kid to cooperate when she's hiding under the covers. It was partly my fault. The covers in question had been in a pile on the floor, and I told her to put them on her bed. She couldn't see them from where she was sitting, and I snapped at her when she didn't get up and look for them (really, a sheet on the floor is a hard thing to miss if you're trying to find it at all). This caused her to huddle under the sheet and weep once she got it onto her bed. I apologized for snapping at her, but she was still a whimpering pile of misery, so I decided to start our review and hope that having something else to think about would improve her mood. It kind of did, but she dragged on everything else we did the entire morning. By the time we finished all our reviews and started language arts, it was already 11am. We introduced a new letter, which made both kids happy. But the copywork took forever (and I had the audacity to suggest that an "o" that looked like a 6 was evidence that P wasn't being careful enough, which resulted in a fresh outburst of tears). I got better results by running downstairs to reboot the laundry and wondering out loud if she could finish before I did. She read her reader fairly happily, though we had a few points of frustration. I think my perfectionism and her perfectionism played against each other to upset both of us. Even the activities I thought would be fun turned out to be frustrating (blindfold the kids and make noises behind them so they can guess what made the noise, but the kids thought it was more fun to sneak peeks; have P look through a picture book to tell the story, but she dawdled at every page and claimed not to know what happened although she eventually proved she did). I thought of giving it up after that, but lunch wasn't ready (I'd baked bread, and it was still in the oven, wider and flatter than I expected - see, even the bread was conspiring against me). So I insisted on the final copywork, which she did slowly and somewhat messily (though I did again require that the "o" that looked like a 6 be redone). The afternoon was happier - all our academic activities being over, the kids played outside in a large puddle for over an hour, and then P finished a sewing project - her first, a picture frame, and it turned out beautifully. I need to keep asking God to help me not yell when frustrated; it's a bad habit I've been trying to kick for years, and it's what ruined the morning.

Week 19, day 5

Friday: Geography. For breakfast, I made omelettes, since we were studying France. I wouldn't have wanted a genuine French epicure to taste them, but my family thought they were pretty good. Over breakfast, we talked about Bastille Day and the French Revolution, and how the nobility's oppression of the poor came back to haunt them - it's better to help the poor than to steal from them...

We reviewed our hymn, catechism, and memory verses (last week's and the one I introduced on Thursday), updated the calendar, and had P read her reader and do her math 5-a-day. I was busy with the baby as she did her 5-a-day, and she did most of it well, but made some minor errors. Usually, I'm around and say as little as possible, but she talks the problem through even though I don't say much in return, which helps her avoid making mistakes. I'm not going to insist on her doing her 5-a-day without any input from me until she's reading fluently, since reading errors are a major part of her problem in working independently.

We started our geography study by outlining and labeling France on the Markable Map. We looked at the France page in the children's atlas. We also read "Madeline" and "Babar" from the 20th Century Children's Book Treasury, and "Puss in Boots" from Stories From Around the World. We then paged through a library book on France and looked at the pictures. P informed me that she did not want to make her own book about France, so I gave her the choice between doing it right away anyway or doing it on Saturday. She decided to do it on Saturday (today), and when I reminded her of her choice this morning she was happy to do it. She made a book with "France" on the cover, she drew the French flag, coloured a map I drew, and drew grapes (for wine), a beautiful old building, the Eiffel Tower, the TGV (high-speed train), and 2 people cycling in the Tour de France.

On Friday afternoon we headed over to Ari's aunt's house. Her house is the same size as Ari's parents' house (where we're living), but her house has 1 person living in it right now and ours has 7, so there's a good bit more space at her place, including a few empty rooms. So we had 3,000 books delivered to her house. These are more copies of the first book in the series, since we hope to sell a lot more of the first one in order to inspire people to buy the second through fourth once they're ready. While looking at the huge stack of boxes in Ari's cousin's otherwise empty former bedroom, I was struck by the idea that God has someone who will be blessed by each of those books, so I prayed that each one would find its target. I have a fun mental image of books flying one by one out the window of the room and landing in people's hands all over the USA and the world as the stacks of boxes of books in the room slowly shrink away.

Week 19, day 4

Thursday: Bible/Music. Today in CBS, the kids heard the story of Zacchaeus. Upon our return, I spent some time taking care of laundry and dishes and getting the baby to sleep, so we got started later than I really wanted to. We reviewed Proverbs 3:5-6, verse 1 of the hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy", and the catechism question, and introduced a new catechism question and memory verse. Then we updated the calendar, and the kids found the storybook we'd read last Friday about the Berlin airlift, so they insisted that I reread that to them. Once that was finished, P read her reader and did her math 5-a-day. She asked to play a math game, and I let her do one of the Think-It-Through activities. Then we finally got around to reading the Bible storybook - we reviewed the story of Zacchaeus, and read about the parables of the lost sheep and the unforgiving servant. Then E and I acted out the story of Zacchaeus (this time, P didn't want to participate) - he was Zacchaeus, and climbed up the bunk bed to get a good view of me, until I told him he needed to come down and host me at his house, which turned out to be the bottom bunk. After that, the kids asked me to take them shopping - there was a doll in the toy store that P wanted to buy, and she was sure it couldn't cost more than the $6.12 she had in her piggy bank. I prepared her for the inevitable, and promised a trip to the library instead if it didn't pan out, so there wasn't too much dismay at the discovery that the doll cost a good deal more than that. We spent a while at the library - I was trying to find picture books having something to do with France, but the pickings were slim - the one book I found was pretty lame. We may read "Babar" from one of the children's book treasuries we have as part of our geography lesson tomorrow. I'd like to make crepes as well, and maybe omelettes for breakfast. By the time we got back from the library, there wasn't time for me to do any music with the kids (I'd hoped to give P the next piano lesson and to work on learning the second verse of "Holy, Holy, Holy", and perhaps play a rhythm game). We're unlikely to get to it tomorrow, either, since we'll be spending the afternoon at Ari's aunt's house helping with the delivery of 3,000 copies of Ari's book. We've run out of storage space at our house, so we'll store these boxes there, hoping that it won't be too long before we have to haul bunches of them over here to sell. If you haven't bought a copy yet, buy it! And tell your friends to, too. We'd hate for the number of copies we've ordered to be a vast overestimate. It's one of the best books I've read, and I'm not just saying that because the author is my hubby!

Week 19, day 3

Wednesday: Math. Wednesday mornings are "Oma Day", when my mother-in-law takes the kids out for breakfast and lunch, and generally comes up with something fun for them to do all morning. I use this time to go to Arabic Bible study. I know this blog is mainly about what the kids are learning, but I'm excited to see progress in what I'm learning. When I started attending the weekly Bible study at the Houston Arabic Church, I knew that my listening comprehension skills were miserable at best. I could usually, given loads of time, piece together what a written article meant, but read aloud at a native speaker's pace I had no chance. Now, after about 6 months, I can usually, just by hearing, tell what verse of the Bible is being read (it helps that I know the Bible really well), or what subject is being talked about. Each person was given a verse to read aloud today, and I participated with some trepidation. I understood that the subject of the study was Christian service, and that each verse addressed some aspect of Christian service. Looking at my verse, I could tell that it had to do with giving (I also vaguely remembered that 2 Corinthians 9 had to do with giving). As I listened to the leader, I could tell when my verse was coming up by the fact that she started talking about giving. I made it through both verses in my passage without stumbling over more than about 5 of the words - I've been practicing reading silently in Arabic on my own. It's so neat to see that my language skills are progressing. I now feel that I'm at about the level of Arabic that I was at in Danish after about 2 months in Denmark, and at that stage my language learning really took off. Of course, there I was completely immersed in the language every day, but if we end up in a place where people speak Arabic, I'm sure I'll be able to pick it up really quickly now.

Once we started school, we reviewed our hymn, memory verse, and catechism (P has all 3 down pretty easily, E knows most of the verse and can fill in when P hesitates). We updated our calendar, and P read her reader (about as fluently as I read my verse at Arabic Bible study) and did her math 5-a-day. Then we moved on to the activity I had planned, which combined math and science and dessert. We baked 4 cakes (tiny ones, each contained only 6 Tbs of flour, the main ingredient, and one egg sufficed for 3 cakes). The kids measured out the ingredients for the first cake mostly without help. The first cake was made to the exact recipe. We were in a hurry to finish before leaving for P's ballet lesson, so for the other 3 cakes I did the measuring and talked about what I was doing. We left out either the egg, the oil, or the baking powder in the cakes I measured for. After P's ballet lesson, we investigated the properties of the cakes. The "everything" cake and the "no oil" cake were fairly similar, though the "no oil" cake was tougher. The "no egg" cake was squishier (it stuck to its foil pan whereas the others didn't) and rose less, and the "no baking powder" cake hardly rose at all, and was by far the least appetizing. I cut the cakes in half, and one half of each into 4 pieces, and we each ate 1/8 of each cake, so we got to review fractions (which, by the way, P is nailing on her 5-a-days). Hooray for math being dessert!

Week 19, day 2

Tuesday: Science. Today's theme at Titmouse Club was dragonflies. The kids learned about the dragonfly life cycle: they start out as eggs, hatch into nymphs that live in the water and hunt water creatures like mosquito larvae and even small fish, and then, after a couple of years, crawl out of the water and molt a final skin, revealing the adult form of the dragonfly. Adult dragonflies also hunt critters, mainly insects - including mosquitoes. I always liked dragonflies; now that I know they're mosquitoes' predators, I like them even more. It's still too cold for adult dragonflies, but the docents had some dragonfly nymphs in pond water in viewers, so the kids could look and see the nymphs magnified and moving around. They made a dragonfly craft with a clothes peg, pipe cleaners for legs, and translucent wings.

After Titmouse Club, we needed to leave for an appointment downtown. B had a dimple on his spine that apparently can sometimes mean there's a problem with the spinal cord, so we had an ultrasound on his back to make sure that there was no problem (which turned out to be the case - thank God for a totally healthy baby). We spent 2 hours in the waiting room because they were really behind schedule, and we hadn't had lunch before we came because we thought we'd be done by 1:30 (it turned out to be 3:30 before we ate). The kids handled it well, though. We were able to explain to them some of the anatomy and the physics of the ultrasound machine (why they had to put gel on B's back, for example). We decided to run some errands on the way back, reasoning that if we'd already lost most of the day, another hour wouldn't make a huge difference.

Once home again, I had P read her reader and do her math 5-a-day, which she did smoothly and easily. It was almost 6pm by the time this was done (we only started at 5:30), so that was all the school that happened today. Real-life learning is good, too, though (in the waiting room, we had some scintillating discussions on the subject of physics in Tom and Jerry cartoons).

Week 19, day 1

Monday: Language Arts. Today, E woke up saying, "It's the beginning of March today!" He's thoroughly aware that his birthday is in March, so today marks another milestone in the approach of that significant day. I made a new calendar while P held the baby, who was hungry and let us all know, so the calendar looks a bit more slapdash than usual. Fortunately, much of the "review" part of school can be done from a sitting position, so I nursed B while we reviewed our memory verse and catechism, and updated the calendar. Unfortunately, E dumped out the folder containing all the names of days of the week, months of the year, weather conditions and numbers, twice. I lost my temper with him the second time. P did her math 5-a-day without too much trouble, and I had E do a "finish the sentence" activity while P finished that. I started a sentence, like "E likes..." and he filled in an appropriate ending. This was easy for him.

We got through the entire week's worth of Language Arts, including both copyworks. P was disappointed that this was another review week and we weren't doing a new letter, so I told her that we'd do one next week. I haven't looked at next week's schedule, but we'll do one whether it's scheduled or not (I'm pretty sure it will be). She read the reader fairly easily - her sight word repertoire is increasing rapidly. She's actually starting to be able to read a number of words in "real life". In church yesterday, she flipped open a pew Bible to 2 Kings 1, and read in verse 4, "So Elijah went." She found a few other individual words she could make out, as well. She also enjoys writing, and we can often figure out what she's written: "Let us lov one a nuthr fr luv cmr Gob." (still with the b/d reversal, though she often sees that she's reversed it after she's written it. This was her memory verse in CBS, and she wrote it completely from memory). This week's language arts had several games scheduled - making words by choosing 2 of 4 consonants that go with a given vowel, matching pairs of words that rhyme, and putting a stack of 10 word cards in alphabetical order. We also read the first few pages of "Tom Thumb" in a fairy tale book, and I had P describe how she thought it should end. Her guess was almost exactly correct, but the story went on to another crisis/climax, so I had her guess again, which this time was quite different from what the book said. She decided she liked the book's ending better. When P was done with the second of the 3 games, we headed outside to draw hopscotch squares with chalk on the patio. Both children enjoyed this, and each drew hopscotch squares of their own. P drew 3 different games, each with more numbers than the last - the final one had 18. E drew one as well, which turned around in a circle, and he tried to write numbers as well. We did the alphabetizing activity outside, despite the wind's attempt to blow the words out of order.

Tomorrow, I plan to start making a "worm box" for composting. We went to Target this afternoon and got a box the right size. This can be an ongoing science experience for the kids, in addition to shorter projects from the book I got on Friday.