Italy

We read Papa Piccolo for this week & a half. It's been crazy, schedule-wise, so I didn't want to push this through. We enjoyed our lazy trip through Venice with Piccolo. First, as we do with all of our non-American settings, we got out the globe. Jimmy learned how to find Italy on the map (he liked the boot but wondered why it was that shape) & then made an Italian flag. For our next reading, we did vocabulatory work - Jimmy asked me what all of the unfamiliar words were. He didn't have to ask about many of them. The boy surprises me with the words he already knows (I called him on several, and he was ready with answers). Finally, we talked about peripherial vision. I even made him learn how to say it - too precious! Anyway, I had him stare at a fixed point while I wiggled my fingers next to him temple. He understood why Piccolo saw the kittens as little blurs when he saw them "out of the corner of his eye." I had planned for him to listen to some Italian children's songs, but he absolutely hated them. We had a much better time listening to the Russian music, so I'll be trying my best to find classic/traditional music to represent new cultures instead of children's songs.

Our letter this week was W. Jimmy did fabulous on handwriting, and the Bible verse came very easily to him this week. He didn't do so well on reading his copy words, tho, but that was mainly because Mean Mommy had him write crazy words like "worm" - should have known better!

We had a very full week with math. Even though we had less days of school, we still did all of the scheduled math lessons. We covered half of a shape with rectangle construction paper pieces, we used our tangram pieces again (Jimmy remembered "parallelogram"), and we reviewed nickels & counting by 5's. Counting by 5's is proving to be very difficult. Jimmy is having a little trouble remembering how to get to 20, but once there, he flies through the rest. The lessons are teaching him through games, like paying for items. We worked with nickels twice this week, and I noticed a marked improvement from one lesson to the next.

Besides our failed attempt to listen to Italian children's songs, we had a blast playing with our stash of musical instruments. Jimmy got a harmonica from his Oma for his birthday (which actually works, unlike the dollar store ones the boys got in their stockings this Christmas). Caleb loved playing Jimmy's harmonica, too, which has given me the idea to celebrate his potty training (whenever that's done) with a new harmonica of his own.