Weekly Wrap-up: road school

We've had another week at a hotel, but it's been uncommonly productive. Not a ton of photographs this week, but some.

One exciting thing that happened is that Dragon asked me to teach him to read. He's little, but he knows all his letters and most, perhaps all, of their sounds. He's also pretty good at oral blending. Over the past week or two he's been very interested in Hero's box of "easy books." Now he's asked me to teach him while I'm teaching Hero. I can do that. We started right away, and went as long as he was interested, and then stopped. I was pleasantly surprised at how many he sat through.

 

 

Hero's not too happy about it, but he's moving into a new phase of writing instruction. Up to this point, we've had a lot of tracing when he's been practicing his letters. Now, we're moving into doing more with him writing his own letters, looking at models. It's harder, and he doesn't love it. However, he's doing pretty well with it. We also are trying adding a little bit of copywork into the mix, and while he doesn't love it, he's doing well with that too. The plan is, now that he's got a basic grasp on letter formation, to use the copywork to identify problem letters, and then do more focused practice on the ones that give him problems.

Easily the coolest thing we did this week was to go see some of the Terra Cotta Warriors. Real ones, from China. The exhibit is pretty expensive, so Hero and the Daddy went it and I skipped, but they way they had things set up I was able to peek at a couple of them from the gift shop, which they had placed at the tail end of the exhibit. While they were doing that, I took Dragon and we looked around at some of the European art from the 1700s and 1800s. I let Dragon choose what we looked at, and he loved the statues. More than a few of them were nudes, and I was very entertained when Dragon pointed out belly buttons several times. Sadly, the museum's policies were not very friendly to photography, so we don't have any pictures from the trip.

We also did the next chapter from Story of the World 2, which was about Monks and Monasteries. Hero wants to do an illuminated letters craft this week, so I need to find one. When we did the reading he was quite taken with the story of the monk drawing a mouse in the margin, so that's the illustration in his narration.

And that's the highlights of our week!