Russia

I started last week with a pretty nasty sore throat. I, of course, lost my voice. I tend to lose my voice for 2 weeks at a time, so I cancelled lessons for last week. Thankfully, my voice returned later in the week (much to my grateful surprise), so we were able to hold lessons this week.

This week's FIAR book was Another Celebrated Dancing Bear. There are a lot of good learning opportunities in this book. First, it is set in Russia. We looked up Russia on the map (much easier to find than France) & made a Russian flag. We talked a bit about the Russian teapot (the samovar), Russian cities (Moscow, where the book is set, and St. Petersburg, where one of the characters visits), Russian dancing (we found several great videos on YouTube), and Russian music (we listened to classical Russian songs several times during the week - I may have to play it more often as great soothing background music). On Tuesday, I had planned to discuss some new vocabulary words, but I had forgotten to bring the list with me when we read the book. So, winging it, I asked the boys to point out any new words they didn't know as we read it. This turned out to be a fabulous way to learn new words! They felt more involved in the learning process (being able to ask questions vs. being "lectured" to) and - bonus - they paid much closer attention to the story. We will definitely use this technique in the future. What a fabulous life skill to teach a life-long reader, too! I also liked doing this earlier in the week. We spend the rest of the week's readings pointing out the new words we learned. Caleb especially latched onto "samovar" - he kept pointing out the pictures of the samovar. Jimmy loved "embraced" - I had to be ready to receive a Jimmy-powered hug every time that word came up in the book (and a few other times, too). We also discussed how the illustrator made etchings, and we had a great opportunity to link our math studies of the calendar into the scheduled lessons of the dancing bears in the books. We even talked a little about time management ("if Boris has to be at Max's at 7pm, and it takes 1 hour to get to Max's house, when should he leave his house?"). All in all, this was one of my favorite weeks this school year.

This week's letter was V. It's a very easy letter to write, so we focused a lot on the rather difficult Bible verse (it was in the King James version) & on writing some longer words (like "vegetable"). I saw a huge improvement in Jimmy's writing, which reminded me that he often makes huge leaps in reading & writing after a short break.

In math, we worked a little more with tangrams (learning what a parallelogram is & how to pronounce it), measured length using linking cubes (Jimmy chose to measure the height & width of his rocket ship cup), introduced the nickel, & learned how to count by 5's. We still need some more work on counting by 5's. We ended the week with a math test - acting out addition & subtraction using counting bears. Jimmy aced it. He's really a pro at the hands-on, application-type math.

I got some fabulous feedback from Jimmy's German school teachers last week. They pulled me aside to tell me that he mastered a pretty complicated word ("servielte" - the German word for napkin). They told me that he has an ear for language, picking up nuances very easily & really listening & trying to say things as correctly as possible. I think this has decided me - if we're still in the area next year (and have income), I would really like to keep him going there.