Grandfather's Journey

This was our last week of the school year!!! Yay!!!

We read Grandfather's Journey this week. A boy tells the story of his grandfather, who lived in Japan until he was a young man. He then moved to California & traveled over the United States. He moves back to Japan for the final season of his life so that his daughter (the storyteller's mother) can grow up in her father's country. For geography, we had already studied Japan during last week's lessons. This week, we focused on the travel aspect - the 3 weeks it took to get to the US from Japan by boat. We "traveled" the ocean using our fingers on the globe. Then our fingers took a walking tour of the US. We reviewed both the Japanese & US flags. We listened to more Japanese music as we did our lessons during the week. On Thursday, we look a field trip to an Asian grocery store, checking out all of the different foods there. Jimmy & Caleb were most impressed by the candies (of course) & got suitably terrified by the blue crabs. (You should have seen it - Jimmy was nearly about to lean on the barrel when one moved. I think he invented teleportation! One moment he was next to the barrel, the next moment, halfway down the aisle.)

We also got to talk about similies - there were a lot of those in the story. Jimmy came up of a few on his own to help learn how they can be used. We discussed the different types of land & water (mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans) that the grandfather saw during his travels. Finally, we looked at the illustrations, which were very reminiscent of a photograph album. The pictures all looked like formal portraits.

For math, we had our last two tests. First, Jimmy covered designs using tangrams. Before the last test, we also had lessons on some, some more stories & dominoes. Then our very last K-level math test - naming the days of the week, counting by 1's to 100, and identifying the penny, nickel, & dime. He passed with flying colors!

Jimmy had his last German school class of the year. He was really sad that it was over, although he still has a picnic next week & his graduation at the end of the month. It will be nice to have our weekends back, though!

That's it for this blog until our summer classes start up. Thanks for reading!

A Pair of Red Clogs

This week's FIAR book was A Pair of Red Clogs by Masako Matsuno. I personally loved the illustrations in the book. The little girl in the book gets a new pair of clogs but very quickly ruins them. She tries to hide the broken clogs from her mom while still trying to get her mom to buy her new ones. She learns a very important lesson in both taking care of her possessions as well as not lying to her parents. My little Destructor of All Things could really use a lesson like this - we still refer to Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel a lot when discussing how to take care of our stuff. This will certainly be added to that mommy rant. =)

So, obviously, we discussed stewardship during the week - taking care of our things. The book is set in Japan, so we also looked up Japan on the globe & found a picture of the Japanese flag in our flag book. (Our flag-making attempts have been pretty pitiful, so I gave up on them.) We listened to two different Japanese music albums in the background while we worked - traditional Japanese music & traditional Geisha music. I really liked both. We also studied a cool little quirk in the illustrations - all of the flashbacks have a lot of yellow in the pictures. (The story is about a grandmother who is about to send her granddaughter a new pair of clogs; she remembers when she was the little girl who broke her clogs.) We talked about flashbacks. Jimmy quickly learned that new vocabulary word - he started telling me a whole bunch of flashback stories. "Mommy, flashing back to yesterday, I had a peanut butter & jelly sandwich for lunch. Can I have pasta today instead?"

For math lessons, we worked with tangrams (covering blank patterns where Jimmy had to decide which pieces would cover the design & how), had a test to copy geoboard designs (lines on a paper grid to transfer to the rubber bands on the geoboard), acting out some, some more stories with teddy bear counters (5 bears jumped in the pool, then 2 more bears jumped in the pool), and - the most fun - weighed containers of "mystery items" on our balance. I used Crystal Light tubes (the kind that hold the 2 quart mixes) & put things like coins, socks, crayons, and cotton balls in them. Jimmy weighed them first holding one in each hand and then put them on the balance to see if he guessed correctly which was heavier. We went a little farther than the Saxon guide & put the containers in order from least heavy to heaviest. Jimmy had a lot of fun with this lesson.

This week's letter was Y. Jimmy memorized the Bible verse & practiced handwriting. He really loved this one, since "Y" is the last letter in "Jimmy."

Jimmy had his German lesson - next week is the last one! He is going to be so sad when it's over.