Lets start 'school' again!!

Well we haven't done any 'real' school for quite some time, although we did learn lots of things each day over the Christmas holiday:

-We watched the March of the Penguins together as a family, and the kids loved it! We skipped the two scary parts, but other than that it was a great movie, and the kids learned lots from it.

-We read all about Monet and his paintings in a new book that E got for Christmas from Nadine and Stephen

-We went for a nice long walk down the ravine in our community and saw what winter does to the trees (no leaves), the stream (turns to ice and you can walk on it), the plants (lots of neat looking seed pods)... And we had lots of fun with walking sticks and the odd patch of snow.

-We listened to Handel's Messiah many times, as well as the Nutcracker suite and danced and danced.

-We watched the nutcracker ballet on DVD and learned the whole story (with commentary from Elizabeth to help us along).

-We played many family games: guess who (teaches logic), dominos (teaches math and matching) etc..

-What a fun time!! I love vacations.

Today, we got up nice and early and cleaned our rooms and then did some schoolwork:

-It's the feast day of St. Elizabeth Anne Seton so we read a long story about her and talked about Italy where she lives (Elizabeth decided she wants our WHOLE family to move to Italy... Including grandmas, grandpa's, cousins, aunties and uncles). After we read the story Elizabeth told it back to me in her own words. She did a great job!

-For math, we practiced counting and writing the numbers from 0-20, and then she did some addition problems.

-We also picked out a book about animals off the shelf, and looked up penguins, where we found pictures and tidbits about the Emperor penguins. Elizabeth drew a nice picture for me of some penguins: A daddy penguin sitting on the egg (they do it for the moms, so the mommies can go back to the sea and eat), with a little boy penguin who came back to visit his daddy. She added detail to them that showed she really paid attention to the movie: black clawed feet, the egg tucked under the daddy, the baby penguin with the grey/black tummy (turns white as he gets older), and the bits of yellow on the daddy's neck and head.

-after lunch we read Ping (a great book about a duck on the yangzte river, and now all three are napping, so i'm off to relax.