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!