Week in Review

It's been a very light week. I started back at work (the opposite of light!) and then caught a cold...

1.In Sunday School, the Bible story was about Mary and Joseph finding young Jesus in the temple. So, one of the centers was a building-the-temple center.  The "bricks" are simply two paper grocery bags put together. Such a great idea.

2.Our friend Anita invited us over to celebrate Epiphany with delicious kings' cake. She hid a ceramic trinket shaped like bread in my daughter's piece of cake.

The trinket became a treasure in Daughter's dollhouse.

3.The home(pre)school co-op's theme this month is prosocial skills, so the preschoolers painted a collaborative circle art mural. Prior to painting, the children were shown circle art paintings, and instructed how to ask another child if they could add to their circle. This activity completely goes against what 3 and 4 year olds want to do, which is one of the reasons it's so interesting. Little ones want their painting to be their own. They don't want to move. They want their own spot. They don't want to paint on someone else's painting, and they don't want someone else to paint on theirs. And when they're done, they want to cut their art off of the mural and take it home.

We moms encouraged the children to trade spots, and helped them find the words to use.

4.My daughter is using Duolingo to learn Spanish. So far, she's completed 8 of 63 skills, and this week, she reached 21 lingots (Duolingo jewels). She's been "saving up" to buy her owl a jacket and monocle (cost: 20 lingots).

A few days later, she earned this:

5.We were invited to Friend B's house for dinner: potsticker pizza cups.

We layered potsticker dough with sauce, cheese, and toppings like turkey pepperoni, mushrooms, and green bell pepper slices, and baked - covered with foil - at 350 for about 10 minutes.

Very yummy.

6.She also went to CC, and reviewed memory work at home. 

She has an easy time with Weeks 1-8, except for Latin and geography. The timeline and history sentences are the ones she finds easiest.

But now we're on Week 14, so I'm trying to focus our review on Weeks 9 through present. And I don't want to spend a lot of time doing this.

(Tangentially, I just read The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, and I found it fascinating. In it, Chua writes about how Chinese mothers drill their children for as long as necessary, so their children will score 100%. Yes, this is the opposite of Charlotte Mason. But I think Chua made some excellent points. As a public school teacher, parents tell me All. The. Time. that they can't get their children to do their homework, and can't get them to read at home. Can't. Chua wrote that Western parents don't make their children practice because they fear that their children will hate them. She also wrote that Western parents perceive their children as fragile, not strong. And I see this, too, with my 4th grade students. Children are strong enough to sit and read for twenty minutes, or go through multiplication flash cards for fifteen minutes. They ARE strong enough.)

We listen to parts of the CD most days. And now I'm having her choose one color per day for flash card review. We have also started reviewing the map daily, pointing to the week's geography memory work. A couple of the things she has learned by doing this is that rivers are represented by blue lines on maps, and that cities are represented by dots. I let her play a Quizlet CC geography game, and we watched some CC songs on YouTube.

7.Second half of the week, we're both sick. We've practiced this week's song on piano, continued practicing adding and subtracting 2-digit numbers without regrouping, cuddled and read library books, Milly Molly Mandy, and My Bookhouse, worked on some piano book-work, sneezed, coughed, and watched Babar, Wind in the Willows, and too much PBS Kids.