This Week

We had a fun-filled, action packed, whirlwind of a week. Here it is in pictures:
We spent Tuesday at the New England Aquarium

We celebrated St. Patrick's Day with one of our favorite books, Tales from Old Ireland, and by cooking some Irish yummies. We made Roasted Cauliflower with Cheese and Irish Soda Bread. They were both quite delicious. You can find the Irish Soda Bread recipe at my friend Marissa's blog http://greenroommag.com/spoonful/?p=833

The kids worked on their science projects all morning on Friday and played outside all afternoon, enjoying some spring-like weather! We read some great books this week, and Dylan began listening to Number the Stars by Lois Lowry on CD. We are all drawn in to the story, including me. We listen to books on CD a lot in the car, and the girls requested Saint Saens's Carnival of the Animals to listen to this week. We have a great recording with the poems narrated by many wonderful actors, including James Earl Jones and Audrey Hepburn. Before I knew it the weekend was upon us, as well as a big hockey tournament in Hyannis on Saturday and Sunday for D! I don't have any pics, unfortunately, because I was in Boston with J at the Massachusetts Suzuki Festival. It was awesome! She had a great time playing her violin with lots of other kids from Massachusetts.

We also heard a concert by local folk musician and Suzuki violin teacher Susan Reed. She is amazing. You can check her out at http://susanreed.com/

Here and there we did some math and language arts, but by and large spent the week very much involved with some of the kids' favorite things - science, cooking, sports, and music. What a great way to spend the week.

the week in review 1/17 - 1/21

This week went by in such a blur I can hardly remember what we did! I am trying to get ready for our trip to Florida, on top of all our regular commitments so I most definitely burnt the proverbial candle at both ends this week. Here's what i remember:

D
We all went to a wonderful opera preview with some singers from the Boston Lyric Opera on Monday. In a few months we will all go to see Engelbert Humperdink's opera, "Hansel and Gretel", so these singers previewed the opera and also educated the kids about opera and singing in general. They were so much fun, all the kids were laughing and having a great time, and I was very pleased to see that both D and J remembered much from the past operas they have seen, The Magic Flute and The Barber of Seville.

Here at the homefront D worked on some expository writing this week. I loved his informative and brief essay entitled, "How to Cook a Fried Egg". It made me laugh and also realize how grown up he is becoming, because he does indeed often cook himself eggs these days. We also reviewed prepositions, contractions, homonyms, and he wrote from dictation several times. He finished 'David Livingston' and is reading the third book in the 'Guardians of G'Ahoole' series. In math he worked on learning how to write trillions, billions, and millions and reviewed conversions and finding averages. He learned about the powers of the executive branch, and about the easter uprising and socialism in Russia post WWI. D continuted his marine science research project, focusing on flounder and sea clams this week. He went to hockey, art, theater, and percussion lessons this week.

J
J lost her first tooth! The tooth fairy paid her a visit, even though she swallowed the tooth in the brownie she was eating at church. She was quite upset about not being able to keep her first tooth, but I assured her there will be many more to come. J read two phonics readers this week and also read a story in her first grade reader. She reads all the time now, anything she can get her hands on, from canned goods in the pantry to menus in a restaurant. It is fun seeing everything begin to fall in to place for her. We read James and the Giant Peach, James Herriot's Treasure for Children, and many library books at our local library, which I now call our home away from home. We were there 3 times on Thursday. Three. Times. She worked on adding by 1 and 2 and also on skip counting and learning her odd and even numbers. Her social studies and science were grossly neglected this week, and I was feeling pretty guilty about it last night. We will need to get back on track after our vacation. But she did practice violin every day and she finished learning the Happy Farmer. She sounds great and all her review songs are solid. She went to gymnastics, and violin group class this week.

We are off to warmer lands in two days! It can't come soon enough as last night it was negative 8 degrees and today our thermometer is registering a balmy 5 degrees fahrenheit. Brrrrrr. More posts to come after our getaway!

Little drummers

We attended a fabulous drum circle class yesterday, led by our friend Ed from South Shore Conservatory. It was awesome! I didn't snap any pics of D playing, but got a few of the girls playing the djembe. So much fun!

Figaro Figaro Figaro Figaro Figaro Figaro Fiiiiiiiiigaro!

We spent the afternoon enjoying Boston Lyric Opera's performance of Barber of Seville. We've been humming Rossini all day :)

All things Russian...

We use the Story of the World audio books, written by Jessie Wise and narrated by Jim Weiss, to learn about history. D loves the way she presents history as a series of interesting stories and is an avid fan of world history. We try to cover one volume per year, and this year we are using Volume 3, which covers history from the late Renaissance to Early Modern times. The great thing about stretching one volume out over the year is that it gives us lots of time to jump off, research, and explore the stories of different countries, religions, and cultures.

We've been learning about Russian history since last year and have loved learning about the 2 Ivans (the 'great' and the 'terrible', aka as Ivan the Awesome to us after watching Night at the Museum 2) and most recently about Catherine the Great and her achievments in modernizing and westernizing Russia. To explore Russian culture a bit more this week we read 'The tale of the Firebird', by Gennady Spirin, a beautifully illustrated book and lovely Russian folk tale. After reading the book, the kids made their own clay firebirds, and decorated/painted them while listening to the Firebird Suite by Stravinsky.

Next we made some yummy Russian food. I've decided that cooking something sweet is always a plus if you can add it into your unit study! D is turning into quite the chef and he made blini, which are Russian pancakes that taste a lot like crepes. (Also, it's really fun to say 'blini'!) We filled them with powdered sugar and cinammon, folded them up and ate them with our fingers. We all agreed that they were delicious. Then we moved on to borscht (another fun word), which is a Russian beet and vegetable soup. Our finished product looked a bit like pale pepto bismal with vegetables floating in it, but tasted pretty good despite it's pallid hue - although the kids might disagree with that statement! I think we probably didn't use enough beets, so it didn't have the vibrant red color one would would expect borscht to have. Borscht will forever be known as pink soup in our house.