We finally had the brain and heart lesson. Luke, Isabel and Sylvia got to finish off their paper bodies.
Now I can throw them away so I can touch up paint over the crayon (thanks Sylvia) in the loft (old schoolroom) and hall. Now what to do with the empty loft?....hmmmm, trophy room? conservatory? parlor? We shall see.
This week we've been back on track. Having our schoolroom be a bookshelf in the kitchen is working out so much better. Being downstairs in the kitchen is where the hubub always is anyway, so having papers, crayons, books, etc. right there makes things very convenient. Before every meal I have at least six pictures Isabel has drawn that I have to clear off....which is great! I guess I need to have a special place that she can put all of her drawings, but the point is that they are getting into drawing, maze making, letter writing and whatever else on their own because it is all right there. The Signing Time dvds are great. Isabel learns so much more from that then from me trying to teach her from a book. We have been making flash cards of the words we've learned and the stack is getting thick! Here is a great ASL dictionary online.
I planned that today after they finished all of their chores, school, and piano, we would go to the pool, but since it is an oh so chilly 78 degrees outside, Sylvia and Luke helped me make cinnamon muffins and we read Little House on the Prairie together.
So, lately I've been really a slacker about school. Right now we are still waiting for Luke's math book so I declared this week, "track break." But I do so love the unexpected snippets of everyday learning. Today Luke was imagining that the earth from space at night would look really neat. So we got on Google images and checked some pictures out. We then looked at this day and night world map. Luke asked why the nighttime part is shaped like a "U." I got down the globe and explained (as best as I could) about the earth's tilt and how if you are far enough north or south, depending on the time of year, the sun might be up for months or down for months. While Isabel was at her dance class Luke and I were watching a Discovery Channel documentary about the ice hotel in Sweden. Coincidentally, it showed and talked about how they had to build the hotel in the dark a lot because the sun was only up for a few hours and that for a month and a half it wouldn't come up at all.
Isabel and I got our Signing Time DVD's from the library! Watching a sign language DVD with my daughter is school I can definitely do while I am having a lazy week.
