The more time I spend studying the scriptures, the more that I am convinced that there is great benefit and clarity in taking time to read it carefully and closely. The more exactly that our understanding of the gospel aligns with what our Father in Heaven is actually trying to teach, the better off we are. Sloppy thinking leads to sloppy conclusions, and this becomes particularly problematic in gospel contexts. He has given us the power of reason, and expects us to develop the ability to think logically, carefully, and thoroughly, in order to detect fallacious ideas and doctrines: this is one of the ways we can try to avoid being taken in when the doctrines of men are mixed with scripture and passed off as Truth.
I realized tonight that it's been almost exactly three years since we started to do a calendar "circle time" in Japanese. I was pretty frightened to even try, but my friend Mrs. C. was right: it's been much more do-able than I thought, back then. And all of us have grown as a result. We started pretty straight forward: just a calendar for "Today is the 11th of July." Actually, we often just count our way through the calendar, since there is some specific jargon for counting days of the month in Japanese. I need to work on helping the kids learn to say, "Yesterday was the 10th. Today is the 11th. Tomorrow is the 12th."
We've learned several songs in the process of doing this calendar stuff. Our toothbrushing song is in Japanese, and the kids know the Wise Man and the Foolish Man, among a few others. We're reinforcing place value -- and Japanese doesn't have the irregular and confusing "teen" numbers: numbers to 100 are completely regular in every way and make place value simple, which is nice. We can count to 1000, and sort of tell time. It's tough teaching and learning time on an analog clock in a new language, but they're getting there!
After starting to work with Latin Christiana, I decided to adopt some of their methods in our Japanese -- specifically, we're practicing some of our verb conjugations by chanting them. It's working so well for the Latin, that I thought I'd try it here, and it seems to be working here as well. It's a nice easy introduction to grammar, which I've been feeling the need to do. I plan to continue to introduce new grammar and vocabulary in this way, starting with the most common and most regular verbs.
For three years of work, it doesn't sound like much. But then I realize that we've done that much in spite of the fact that calendar time is one of the things that we miss as much as we hit. And my own ability to deal with these parts of the language has been greatly enhanced by working on them these past three years. And that's all to the good, because where I improve, I can help my kids more effectively.
We still don't have anybody but each other to speak to, and I'm still not fluent. But I do see marked improvement in all of our skills. Showing the kids what I have learned, in spite of not being fluent, doesn't freak me out anymore. We know more words, we use them more frequently in our daily lives. We just started watching the Netflix cartoon "Troll Hunters" -- in Japanese. And we have several regular channels for watching Minecraft videos in Japanese. It's amazing how much my kids have learned -- and use naturally and fluently -- from watching Minecraft videos on YouTube. I wish that I was able to sit down and watch it with them more often; we all learn more when I can come and do some dictionary work to help expand our vocabulary.
I really can't say enough good about the HiNative app. It lets me ask natives how to say the various things we want to say, so that we're learning real Japanese, checked over by real native speakers, and not a pseudo-Japanese imposter that we make up thinking that we're speaking Japanese. That's a real lifesaver, because I have yet to locate a book that will teach us household Japanese. But we keep asking for the sentences that we want to learn, and it's slowly adding up.
Progress, including slow progress, is success.
I'm glad that I didn't let not knowing scare me off. This is fun.
The boys love to use my fancy Japanese pens. I love that it makes it easy to persuade them to practice their Japanese. Which is what we were doing today. Dragon and Hero both did a great job.
We'd planned to do school throughout the summer, but with all the excitement in our house, it didn't happen. Almost all the reconstruction is finished; we have a closet that needs to be painted, as well as some touch-up painting in the kitchen. The carpets are being cleaned next week, and then it's "just" a matter of getting all the stuff sorted back into its proper places. We picked school back up this week.
We started out with a birthday cake (Green Lantern), and the little guy had a run-in with hand, foot, and mouth disease. But he's much better now. By the time we did the shaduf on Thursday he was back to toddling around. I like that. After the high fevers and the painful blisters in his mouth, his little smile was a most welcome sight!
Easily the most exciting thing we did this week was building a shaduf, after we read about it in History. I have tons of cute pictures that I'm working on turning into a post of their own, so I'll just give you this one. It turned out awesome. Monkey also did a narration on what we did for the project.
What did we do? We built a shaduf. We also used it.
How did it work? It worked by us using tape and a string on a bo staff. Both ends got used. We attached one of my buckets to one end. Then we did the cans and put them on the back end.
What did the shaduf do? It carried water. But ours was different from a real shaduf. What made it different is that the middle part wasn't the same. Our counterweight wasn't a rock; it was made out of cans.
Since we talked about levers, counterweights and the fulcrum, the shaduf included more than a passing nod at Science as well as History. But who's counting, right? Our official Science for the week was looking at dolphins and black-capped chickadees. I love the bird clips on YouTube. We see chickadees on our feeders all the time, and I've pointed out their call often enough that Monkey commented that it's familiar when he watched the clip. But there's something cool about the close-ups, and there are some really nice clips on there. This one calls itself a "mini-documentary."
Phonics is going well. Monkey is very comfortable with short vowel sounds now, and we're starting to introduce some of the other vowel sounds. It's going to take some practice, but he's getting there. We also added a few more review games from our Happy Phonics kit, which has been a nice change of pace. The "Build a Sentence" game has been a particular hit with Monkey, and I like it as well because it forces him to pay attention. The words in the game are pretty basic, so I may expand this game a little to make it reflect the rules we've learned recently.
I decided that our Math was not really challenging Monkey, and so we'd picked up the pace a while back, but still he didn't seem to be challenged. After making it a matter of prayer, I've decided to skip him ahead in the book a little. But this means we need some new manipulatives: cuisenaire rods and base 10 blocks. And, I need to re-plan what we're doing when. So, other than a few tanagrams one day, we didn't do math this week, and likely won't next week either.
We practiced Writing the letters N, R, and W this week, as well as doing the copywork, "Jesus made the world." He's doing well. Much more comfortable with capital letters still, but making progress.
We have several postcards that have come in since last we learned about the countries our cards come from for Geography. When I grabbed one, it was from Poland, so that's the country we learned about this time.
In Grammar, we're discussing pronouns, and I put the list of pronouns in Monkey's Memory work book. He's doing well on memorizing the list, and we're about halfway through the set of pronoun lessons in First Language Lessons. It's not very exciting, but it's building a good grammar foundation which will be useful later when we start doing foreign languages and more compositions.
We spent a long weekend at Grandpa & Nana's house last weekend, so I didn't get my wrap-up post up. Instead, we hung out with family, baked goodies, and watched the Church's General Conference. When we were packing up to come home Sunday night my Dad said he wished the weekend was longer, and I agreed. But it was a lovely weekend while it lasted.
But Grandpa and Nana had to go back to work and all the kids had to go back to school, so we came home again and got back to work ourselves. Happily, much of our work is very enjoyable!
I realized that Monkey is not being challenged anymore in our math, so I completely reworked the schedule to really pick up the pace. The plan is to move into some more challenging stuff in the next little while. He loves doing the work; it's pleasantly play-like. But I need to get him to a place where it's requires a little bit of effort. I feel like I'm floundering around a bit, but he's having fun and loves math - it's one of his favorites.
We finished up Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, tried a chapter each of The Incredible Journey and The Prince and the Pauper, before settling in for some more Laura Ingalls Wilder with Little House in the Big Woods. Selecting a read-aloud that fits nicely is still one of the most difficult things. I think after we finish this one we'll go on to Farmer Boy. Hopefully by then I'll have a clue as to what should come next.
We only did one science project this time because, oddly enough, I had a hard time finding the regular food coloring that comes in those drop-shaped bottles. I was out of red, and a color-mixing activity without one of the primary colors seemed a little pointless. We were going to do it over the weekend with Nana, but forgot. But what a success when we finally got it all together! I think he spent more than an hour doing this, and when he saw me do the collage for the blog post he asked to do it again. Works for me!
We also learned about puffins. It hadn't really registered that puffins are predators - they eat little fish - until Monkey announced that they're fierce birds. Not sure I agree with his assessment, but I can understand why he'd say it. In addition to the two clips on the puffins post, we also watched this, which I thought was fascinating for the way that they "fly" underwater. I was also very pleased with Monkey's narrations. I asked him some leading questions, but otherwise, these are his words:
For Red-tailed Hawks (last week):
Red-tailed hawks are fierce, and rip the animals open to eat them. The babies make a "tik-tik-tik" sound. The mama red-tail hawks and the baby red-tail hawks, they are a family.
A bird of prey is a bird that claws other animals. It holds the animal and takes it to his baby. Their beaks are hooked because they are predators.
And for puffins (this week):
There are three kinds of puffins: Atlantic Puffins, Horned Puffins, and Tufted Puffins. They have their nests in holes, and when they are not living there they use the water as their home. They dive for food. They use their wings to drive under water and they let bubbles out behind.
Phonics is moving forward. In addition to CVC words, we're adding some 2 consonant endings: -ll, -ss, -st, things like that, and he's doing well. Blending is getting noticeably smoother, which is exciting. And, probably most exciting of all, we're back to reading the Bob Books! I told Monkey when he's read me all 12 of the little Bob Books I'd get him a Super Friends book. He thinks that's worth working for. We're both happy.
First Language Lessons is, mostly, a breeze, though the difference between common and proper nouns is tricky. We did four lessons last week and four lessons this week. The memory work is fun, and coming right along as well.
We also had some very successful nature study this week - our first trip to the park this spring, and then later in the week one of my friends brought her baby chicks over and we played with them. Those both deserve a post of their own, there's so many fun pictures. I'll leave you with this one of Raven as a teaser:
We started doing First Language Lessons this week. I suspect that we'll breeze right through this pretty quickly; it's relatively straight-forward and Monkey's good at language stuff. The first lesson introduces nouns, so of course I had to go find the applicable Schoolhouse Rock clip! Music makes everything better.
I felt the need to buy books this week. This happens sometimes. Fortunately, I hadn't been to my favorite thrift store in a bit, so we headed there while we were out grocery shopping. What a great call! The books were $.25 each; we spent $5.50.
And, as is the norm for our house, we had a steady diet of lego creations. This one is a Batplane. We also had a dragon, some tanks, a starfighter, a missile (several of those), a couple buildings, a pyramid-shaped staircase... yeah. Lots of legos around here. We even used them for math.
The Math Expressions book uses "bodies in motion" regularly to help cement the number concepts we work with. This time Monkey chose to do jumps. He jumped 10 times, then 9 times, then 7 times, as we worked with the numbers. He always loves that sort of thing!
Monkey's been enjoying a steady diet of "Super Friends," and as a result I am often corrected if we call him the wrong thing: "Wonder Woman, I'm Superman today!" Oops. Guess I'd better get that right! He's got two Superman shirts and a Batman, and for the days that those are dirty, he talked me into making a bat-symbol to pin to his chest. And of course the cape. Always the cape.
And then there was the balloon creations. Note that he was Batman that day. :])
We had a look at the super moon. That was chilly - and a bit frustrating because I was struggling with my camera at a time when I cared how the pictures turn out. I need to go take some more moon pictures sometime just to figure out the new camera some more.
Let's see. I made biscotti. Monkey helped me eat them. Especially the half covered in chocolate. He wasn't all that impressed with them once the dipped part was gone, but he sure liked to have the chocolate part!
In addition to that we had a visit from several of my family members, which I completely failed to photograph. BAD me! And we did a bunch of school, though we did take Thursday off while the family was here. I guess maybe there's a reason why I felt like this was a busy week, even more so than usual.
I'm thinking about doing this oil-on-the-paper experiment to explain about birds staying dry when they're on the water. Also, it just sounds cool. They said they couldn't stick their fingers through wet paper if it had oil on it. I want to try!
A pair of very good questions from the Representative from Texas: "We have to remember, a no fly zone is an act of war. Now what moral right do we have to participate in war activity against Libya?" AND What would we do if someone slapped our United States with a no-fly zone and sanctions, and then started bombing to enforce it?
Additionally, if we ARE going to go to war, it's Congress's job to decide, NOT the president's. He's commander once we decide to go to war, but the decision is not his to make.
Also, here is Susan Wise Bauer doing a dictation with her 13yo son. While it's not an exciting pair of videos (you spend a lot of time watching him write), I found it very instructive as to what dictation actually looks like. I didn't expect that there would be so much grammar instruction in the process. And she basically had him do the problem orally before wrote it, which surprised me because I'd conceived dictation as a primarilly written sort of thing. And that, altogether, is very interesting.
For further reading on why this matters, try the message boards here first and then here.
I've been browsing through scriptures.byu.edu looking at what the Brethren have to say about the Tower of Babel in preparation for my Sunday School lesson, and I happened upon this from Elder Orson Hyde:
A thorough knowledge of our own mother tongue is an important key to that wide field of usefulness which in this day more especially invites the energies and enterprise of the rising generation than at any former period in the history of the world. By some, the inspiration of God is considered to supersede the necessity of this and every other science. On this erroneous principle some of you may act, and require me to impart to you a knowledge of our language without any mental labor on your part. This I would not do, if I could; for I do not want this class dishonored with one drone in the hive. I intend to do my duty, and shall expect you to do yours. Although I thus speak, I do not believe that anyone of you entertains any such opinion. Persons of this faith will not come here for the object that has called you out. It is true that God generally calls upon the illiterate or unlearned to bear his name and testimony to the world. In this, the policy of our Heavenly Father differs materially from that of the world. Under his policy, none can say that the important truths which the servant of God is required to declare are the result of his great or superior learning. But the question with me is, Must the servant of God always remain an unpolished shaft in the quiver of the Almighty? I answer, No. The Spirit of God directs improvement in everything that is good and useful. If any doubt this, consider what our leading men were when called, and then consider what they now are!
Can I just take a minute & say what an amazing resource this website is?! It's the first place I go look for further explanation of passages in the scriptures when I want further clarification.
