Yay! No School This Week!

Monday morning after breakfast, Sparkle did her journal without any prompting, even though she had been rejoicing that there was no school this week. Then after I finished the breakfast dishes she came up to me asking when I was ready. Ready for what? School. No, we're not doing school this week. Oh, yeah. Go play. Okay! I guess that she's gotten used to the habit of school.

After that I didn't have to reminder her that I wasn't doing school. However, a few things did sneak in. So far she's done her journal every morning this week. She's almost to the end of the book and I need to remember to get a new one for her.

Tuesday was St. Patrick's day and I had somehow managed to have three relevant library books (one on St. Patrick, one about a family with a St. Patrick's day tradition, and one about Leprechauns). I read the three picture books to the girls. We looked up St. Patrick and the Irish Potato Famine on the timelines and I made index cards for them and we filed them in the timeline box. (I think that the key to getting this done was having me make the cards myself beforehand and skipping a picture.) We looked up Ireland on the map and saw that it was close to England and France across the Atlantic Ocean from America. And I managed to keep Glitter from falling headlong down the stairs while she squirmed on the landing under the map where I read.

Tuesday the girls also cajoled me into doing teatime, even though we weren't doing school. I read from a book of Chinese Mother Goose rhymes from the library. Glitter lasted almost the entire teatime before wandering off.

Wednesday we went to playgroup. Sparkle was writing the alphabet on the chalkboard there. I teased her to write "I don't have school today." She asked if that was for school. I told her no, why would you write that you don't have school if you are really doing school. Then she said that it was too hard, and I realized that she didn't know how to spell several of the words. Then after a few minutes she started writing an easier to spell version. "I have no s " Then I realized that it had been a long time since she'd spelled the word "school" so I prompted her with the sounds of the phonogram "ch/k/sh" and she got it. I wish that I had taken a picture.

Thursday I decided that I really needed to bury myself into my computer working on how I want to teach Chinese, so I moved the computer to the kitchen table and told the girls to play. In the middle of the afternoon Sparkle was reading when she suddenly called me to look at something. She wanted to show me a contraction in the book. Last week I had started teaching her about contractions (I'm, you're, we'll, etc.). She continued reading the rest of the book, every now and then exclaiming when she'd found another contraction.

I find her excitement about the contractions amazing. She's been seeing and reading contractions all along, but now she knows what they are and it's like she's seeing them for the first time. (Side note: I think having names for things is a powerful tool. A flower is flower, is a flower, is a flower, but teach the names for the different parts and suddenly there's so much more to see. A rock is a rock, is a rock, but learn the different types of rocks and how they're formed and suddenly rocks are much more interesting.)

Tomorrow is Friday, and I was planning on burying myself in the computer again to get this Chinese stuff into usable shape. But now I'm thinking that I really ought to take the girls to the park where the homeschool group is meeting Friday morning. I've had them cooped up in the house for most of the week and they'd love to get out of the house.