Year 1: Week 20

Our composer this term is Tchaikovsky... because I knew we would be seeing The Nutcracker. Gemma was thoroughly absorbed. I thought it was pretty cool that we got to see the girl who played the Sugarplum Fairy three years ago when she played Clara.

In addition to this term's songs, Gemma is also practicing all of the songs for this year's Christmas pageant. In piano, Gemma is continuing to work on Alouette, Pastorale, and Ode to Joy.

In geography, we read about The Beaver and The Mahogany Tree, and located Honduras and the Bay of Honduras on the map. In history, we're in the 4th and 5th centuries BC, and our reading this week was The Sword of Damocles, The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, and - from Hillyer's Art History - April Fool's Pictures. In Natural History, we read about dead nettle and pea flowers, and more about sticklebacks; Gemma also got her first issue of Nature Friend and is enjoying that. In math, Gemma completed a chapter in Life of Fred, as well as some pages in Mathematical Reasoning.

We went to see The Man Who Invented Christmas. It's about Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol, and Gemma was enthralled the entire movie, asked to read A Christmas Carol, and asked for a quill and ink so she could write like Charles Dickens.

We went to Gemma's CC community's Christmas party...

...and an Advent lunch at church.

In literature and poetry...

We read 3 more pages of Lamb's As You Like It. Gemma memorized "Corn" from Nature in Verse, and read several poems from that book. Her fable was The Crow and the Pitcher, and her fairy tale was The Master-Maid.

I left The Master-Maid bookmarked for my husband to read aloud to Gemma. When I got home from work, he remarked that he wasn't sure what the point was. Here was my response (which is only about the very beginning of the fairy tale, and which shouldn't be explicitly told to a child):

The King's son is like Adam, and the giant is like God. The King's son is the giant's servant, as Adam is God's servant. The giant gives the King's son a job, the same way that God gives Adam the job of working and keeping the garden.

The giant is a kind master, expecting his servant to do his job well, and to obey him and resist temptation of going into other rooms, in the same way that God tells Adam he can eat from any of the trees except for one. The punishment for giving into the temptation to go into the other rooms is, the giant says, death, the same way that Adam's punishment for eating the forbidden fruit is death.

Gemma drew another princess from Draw 1-2-3...

And she put this on the refrigerator...

She decorated her dollhouse for Christmas.

She made gifts by wrapping unifix cubes in origami paper.

She chose Van Gogh's First Steps, After Millet as her picture for picture study. While she was studying the picture, I asked her some questions to help her describe the scene using more than colors and concrete nouns...

• What is each person doing?
• Why do you think he/she is doing that?
• What do you think he/she was doing right before this moment?
• Why do you think so?

This "week" was actually 11 days, and what a lovely 11 days they were. 😊