Bee Bop Parade

First Ever Camping Trip

2013-05-18T19:45:00.002-07:00

This happened a while ago, on Easter weekend to be exact. We went camping, hooray! Now, you might not think it's such a big deal. But last time I went camping family-style I was in elementary school. And I'm not sure Chris has ever been camping before.

Fortunately, we have terrific friends who are seasoned campers 'cause they go camping a lot and also 'cause they have a camper. They also have a ton of gear, doubles and triples of many things which was helpful. And my brother was able to join us. He's just about the most adventurous and outdoorsy person I know. Which is great for real backwoods stuff, but is not particularly useful at a nice family-style campsite. But what's really useful is that my bro is an awesome camp cook.

One thing you gotta know about camping with Russians is that there will be lots and lots of food. The entire day will revolve around cooking and eating food. Since food is so important to the success of the outing, it won't be any ordinary stuff like sandwiches. No freaking way! Instead, there will be some sort of soup (why do my American friends think soup is so complicated? it's just about the easiest thing to cook!), lots of veggies - fresh (scallions, radishes, cukes) and cooked (roasted corn, baked potatoes) and, of course, shishkebabs.

Anyway, the three of us - Chris, myself and M - were total noobs at this whole camping thing. But I think we fared well. M loved it. The first night we tried getting him to sleep in the camper with his friends. At first he was all for the idea. But as soon as the lights were out, he asked to sleep in the tent.

The second, last night, was particularly awesome. I let M stay up late. I wrapped him in a warm blanket and he sat by the fire, listened to his bedtime story, ate s'mores, watched the stars. Then he just sat and watched the fire and listened to the adults talking and fell asleep. It was just about perfect, I thought.

Here's the picture of the delicious shishkebabs my brother made. I fixed a salad to go with them. And we had grilled corn and baked potatoes too. Now, let me say a couple of things about baked potatoes. If you cannot enjoy a real baked potato, yes, the kind with ash on its skin 'cause it wasn't wrapped in foil, then too bad for you! You are totally missing out on things.

Here's the (now, in retrospect) funny thing about this camping trip. We forgot M's warm clothes. Yep, we sure took warm jackets for ourselves. But somehow we forgot M's sweaters and warm pants and, well, even a rain jacket. That's some parenting, I tell ya. Still, the kid did great and was happy and warm throughout the 3-day trip.

Since returning from our first ever camping trip, we traded our giant 6-person tent for a more modestly sized 4-person one. Our friends upgraded their popup camper to a better model. And we vowed to go camping again soon, as soon as we get a camping stove.

Oy Vey, It's Already the End of May!

2013-05-18T18:55:00.002-07:00

... and it looks like I've been absent from this here space for a number of months. But not to worry, nothing extraordinary has happened here and we're all doing just fine. Simply put, I was way overwhelmed and reached a total burn-out point. Couldn't stand looking at the computer screen unless I absolutely had to (for work).

But I'm back for now. So let's see, what's going on around here...

First of all, the biggest news right now is that Moebius Noodles, the book my friend/co-author/math wizard/fellow homeschooler and I've been working on for the past couple of years is out and it's awesome (or so I hear). So GET A COPY for yourself, your friends, your kids' teachers and so on. We've heard the book makes a great baby shower gift. PDF is pay-what-you-want (just remember, we worked real hard on this book and it's awesome) and you can order a hard copy too.

I'll post more updates about the book as things happen. So far, Maria and I appeared in a guest article on the Scientific American blog.

Ok, so that's that. On to the latest house/yard project. We're slowly, but surely turning our backyard into an amusement park. A few weeks ago we bought a used 15' trampoline on Craigslist. It seemed like a good deal - the huge trampoline was in a very good shape, including the safety net. But it turned out to be a GREAT deal, unbelievable awesome deal 'cause, check it out, the people who were selling it gave us a swing set, complete with swings, fort, sandbox, fireman's pole, and a slide. And to top it all off, they gave us a zipline. Yep, they just gave it all to us!

So Chris was very busy the last week or so. First, he had to take the playset apart and get it to our yard. Then he was busy setting up the trampoline. Then he put up the swings. Today was the zipline day. And next week the rest of the playground will be done (hopefully).

Now, I was going to take pictures of Chris setting up the trampoline. I figured, it'd take an hour or two of work tops. But turns out, putting together a used trampoline is very different from all those youtube videos of putting together a new trampoline. So it took us like 3 days, including rust-proofing, cleaning the springs, and lots of hammering. Besides, turns out, trampoline assembly means spending most of the time in very uncomfortable positions, usually bent over. And straining to connect the stupid parts. Not very photogenic.

So the only picture of me that I allowed here is where I'm doing light work - ducttaping parts together (that's also not in any of the videos).

Ok, fine, I'll including this one. Although it's obviously a staged shot (to Chris's great annoyance I never lift with my legs). But M took this picture, so I'm including it.

Yesterday we had friends over for a little trampoline-jumping playdate. It was awesome! We just need loads of Bug Off spray, mostly for parents 'cause kids don't seem to be bothered. Another option for adults is to stay in the house. You see, the trampoline is so giant that it can be seen from pretty much any window of the house. But the best view is from the sliding door which, coincidence I think it isn't, is by our kitchen table.

BTW, if you are wondering about a zipline adventure tour for yourself... Sorry, the zipline we have is not designed to hold adults. I mean, it will hold (it held me), but you get like no speed on it. Plus we set it pretty low to the ground - good for little kids, but a pain for anyone above 5' tall.

The Books We Read This Week

2013-01-03T20:39:00.002-08:00

Ok, so the week is not over yet, but I better post these books now so I don't forget to do it later. Since our old car was not driving all that well plus so many of our friends spent their winter break either travelling or being sick or both, we spent more time than normal at home in the past few days. So we read a lot.

I picked up the book of Bazhov's tales last time I was in New York mostly because I wanted it for myself. The language seemed quite difficult for a young child to understand. There are a lot of words that fell out of use long time ago. Kids in Russia might be exposed to some of these words through fairy tales and old cartoons. But my son is not one for fairy tales (he'll ask to read and re-read the Complete History of Star Wars instead) and the only Russian cartoons he is still interested in are Smeshariki, Fixiki and Pin Code. So I was very surprised when M liked the stories, kept asking for more, remembered the names of the characters and even talked about what if he was in those stories. I'm going to try to show him some of the old Soviet cartoons based on these stories.

This is another one of my favorite childhood books. I tried reading it with M months ago, but he wasn't too interested. The language is not difficult and the stories are funny and engaging. I think he was too much into his rockets and space exploration phase though. So by the time we picked up this book again, we've already read about Paddington Bear and Emil from Lonneberga, much longer and more involved stories. As M is getting older, he's becoming a lot more thrilled with mischievous characters yet he still wants them to be cute and cuddly. I think that's why this time around Kuzka stories are such a big hit.

Angelo is the first book that I insisted on not translating into Russian. M didn't like the idea of me reading a book in English. But he became too absorbed in the story after just the first couple of pages. To keep things consistent with our one parent one language approach, I plan on only reading in English during our English lessons. Our evening story time will remain in Russian for the foreseeable future. As for the book, M found the story more sad than happy. I saw him blinking away a tear or two as the story moved along. We talked a bit more about this story (in Russian) which gave me an opportunity to introduce a few new Russian words, such as штукатурка, штукатурщик, херувим, строительные леса, etc.

M liked this book, the Perfect Square, enough to pick up a square of origami paper and scissors and do his own little collage. I hoped for more, but what can I say - M just doesn't like cutting, tearing or gluing paper.

This week we also read two more math books. The first one was 1+1 = 5 and Other Unlikely Additions. I tried it some time ago, but without much success. This time, however, M was thrilled. He insisted we read the book a couple of times and then he retold me the entire story. We even tried coming up with our own unlikely additions. What I liked most was that both number recognition and addition were present, but not central. M used both without even really noticing it since he was so absorbed figuring out the attributes in each picture that really made each addition work.

The last book I want to share is Roman Numerals from I to MM. No, I'm not teaching M Roman numerals. But I wanted him to see how using different numerals affects how we write and read numbers. He liked the idea that numbers could be written as letters. He LOVED the fact that his letter, M, was used for the largest single-symbol value (M = 1000). It didn't hurt that the pictures of cute piggies were so darn... cute. He immediately recognized them from Hogwash and Pigaroons books. I like this book and will try going a bit more in-depth with it in a few months.

Happy New Year!

2013-01-03T19:44:00.003-08:00

Happy New Year! I can't believe it's only January 3rd. The past few days have been a whirlwind. To begin with, I cooked a TON of food... again. Yep, after the giant Thanksgiving dinner complete with the everlasting turkey, I promised to myself that the New Year's застолье would be a very modest one - just some cheese and olives and a store-bought dessert. Oh, and maybe just a tiny bit of the Olivier salad. Oh, and Chris wanted red caviar, so of course a tiny jar of that. Plus, to add a bit of color, a small bowl of the beet salad.

Yeah, right! Somehow I ended up with two giant bowls of salads - one with Olivier and the other one - with the beet one. And I baked brie in puff pastry with the secret-recipe cranberry sauce and almonds. Oh, and not to forget, a giant cast iron pot of жаркое. So it was a whole lot of food after all. The good part is I haven't had to cook for the past few days. Which is just as well because we were busy looking for and buying a car.

So now we have a new certified pre-owned car. Hooray to us! Our old car which we bought genuinely new back in 2002 (when we were young and naive) has seen better days, much better days. We haven't been taking it on highways or anywhere outside of the 30 mile radius from our house for about a year. We'll be sad to see it go (when and if we sell it) 'cause it's been a great car to us even though pretty much everyone we know told us from Day 1 that it was total crap and we made like the biggest mistake of our lives.

Nor was buying our first car as much of a pain and a time-suck as buying this one. Seriously! I hate the entire process now and hope to not have to go through it again for the next 10-12 years. And by then we'll have bullet trains and moving sidewalks installed everywhere anyway.

Ah, I forgot to mention the gifts our very lucky son got for the New Year! A very indulgent Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa, got him this awesome thing. Needless to say, M is in love! He spent what seemed like the entire New Year's Day alternating between driving Sphero around the house and driving us up the wall complaining that Sphero wasn't charging fast enough. For now M uses Sphero mostly for flipping virtual cupcakes to Sharky the Beaver in the augmented reality game (at the end of each round Sharky says "sugar coma" which apparently M finds super funny; he also pointed out that Sharky must have lots of cavities).

M also got more lose Legos, something he really wanted for his ambitious construction projects. But at this point nothing could compete with Sphero.

Finally, this week we are back to homeschooling. Seems like our winter break lasted forever! But more on that later. For now, Happy New Year to All and to All a Good Night!

Last Christmas Cookie

2012-12-29T18:46:00.001-08:00

... has been eaten and I'm just now getting around to updating the blog with all the Christmas related stuff. Yep, we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas. What's more, we also celebrate my most favoritest holiday of all, the New Year (so stay tuned for that one). And yes, there are gifts for M for each of these holidays. So we try to keep it very low-key in terms of gifts - 1-2 gifts for each holiday and nothing over the top. More about gifts later.

This year we had the most elaborate run-up to Christmas ever. Last year everything was very low key because, with Chris deployed, I just didn't feel like it. Nor did I have much time for things other than a tree and a gingerbread house. But this year, oh my!

First, we made the gingerbread house with the lovely kit from Trader Joe. This is my favorite gingerbread house to date and I do hope they sell it next year too. It didn't have weird ingredients, was super-easy to put together, looked very nice and cost only about $7.

Once the gingerbread was up, it was time to go get the tree. A couple of years ago, when we had a very snowy winter (yep, we do get those in the Piedmont area once in a while), we went to a nearby tree farm and cut down our own tree. Which was fun. But this year we waited until like three days before Christmas to get the tree and knew that all the good ones at the farm were already claimed. So instead we bought ours at the farmers' market.

Next, it was time to bake Christmas cookies. I had very ambitious plans for baking sugar cookies, gingersnaps, and making chocolate almond bark. Except I also planned on cleaning the house. So in the end I had no energy for the big production. Chris and M did the sugar cookies and I put together gingersnaps. BTW, both were Alton Brown's recipes and turned out delicious!

A couple of days before Christmas we already had gifts for M, but not for each other. Since our car required some expensive repairs just before Christmas, we didn't feel like getting anything pricey. Instead, we all went to my favorite thrift shop. And, much like Alton Brown, this thrift shop never fails. We bought a couple of nice ornaments for our tree, a Rumertopf unglazed clay bread baker for Chris (he said he always wanted one) and a hand-carved wooden chips and dip tray for me. All for like $7.

The day before Christmas we went to our good friends. M had a lot of fun, as usual, playing with the boys. And the adults were able to have an almost uninterrupted conversation punctuated with good wine. Which sounds idyllic except I had to leave the party 'cause of the most horrendous headache ever.

Ah, so what did M get for Christmas? He got three gifts. Two were Lego Education kits - Simple Machines and WeDo robotics. These are not cheap, but we got them free as part of the OurMilitaryKids.org grant (for M's participation in the JrFLL Lego club earlier this year). And the third gift was the Angry Birds: Star Wars game I finally downloaded to the iPad.

So the Christmas day was spent building with Legos. The first thing M built with Chris's help was a crane. But he got bored with that quickly and insisted we built and programmed an alligator with a light sensor. The gator turned out to be the Rebel gator and bravely fought against several Imperial troops and Lord Vader himself.

P.S. I was also busy putting together a 72-hour emergency food supply as part of my Challenge on eCentify.com. M got totally into this (he loves anything that has to do with stockpiling for difficult times ahead) and built this "emergency surprise tower" of food. Notice, he remembered the tea tin (so you can make tea, Mama), fruits (so that we can make fresh juice) and a kitchen timer (so we know what time it is).

Hanukkah

2012-12-18T17:58:00.000-08:00

With all the excitement of yard mega-projects and Lego League, Hanukkah just about flew by. The coolest thing was that my parents came to visit us. They arrived on the first evening of Hanukkah and stayed for 4 days, just about the record (except for when M was born and when I had surgery).

We had great time too. My Dad is not big on going places and doing things. He loves spending time with M as long as it's in or around the house. Which explains why we have like no pictures of him (oh, and he doesn't like being photographed either). My Mom is just the opposite. She loves going places as long as we don't have to drive after dark (she gets motion sickness) and she doesn't mind being in a picture.

We didn't have an overwhelming "program" for the visit. We had a nice first evening of Hanukkah. The next day Grandpa took M to the store and got him the one toy M's been dreaming about (and asking for) now that he's all about Lego Hero Factory once again. Of course, he asked for Stormer XL (saw the darn thing on the LEGO YouTube channel). At first M was puzzled over what XL stood for. After repeating it several times though he realized that sounded just like "excel". And once he put Stormer together, he also saw that it was quite big, bigger than all the other Heroes, so XL was also extra-large. Which reminds me...

a few days after getting his new Stormer XL, after clearing up the mystery of what XL stands for, M was telling me something about his new Stormer and I said something along the lines "well, in this regard he's a bit like you, isn't he". A little while later, I overheard M's conversation with Papa:

M: "Papa, you know, Mama said that I'm kind of like Stormer XL."
Papa: "Oh, yeah? How so?"
M (totally serious): "Well, maybe it's because I'm kind of large for my age"
(the kid is at the bottom of the weight chart for his age and just around the middle of the height chart).

Grandma got to go to M's Lego League showcase and also to the Life and Science Museum. That plus our regular phys therapy appointments and homeschool took up a large chunk of our time.

Then the evenings were spent cooking (unlike me, my Mom can cook just about anything out of just about anything without cookbooks and it will be delicious), baking (my hubby, who's rightfully famous in my family for his bread-baking was doing a master class for my Mom), and listening to my Mom's lectures on alternative medicine, food additives and healthy lifestyle (sorry, Mom, you're right, you're right, but sometimes it gets to be too much of a good thing).

All in all, it was great. I just wish they stayed for longer than 4 days!

The rest of Hanukkah was hectic and we didn't get to play dreidel until the last day of the holiday. This year M learned to spin it pretty well and, when we added chocolate coins to the game, quickly remembered all the rules. He would get all dramatic about it too, exclaiming "Gimmel for me!" and "Oh, I got Shin again!" But he was pretty lucky. I, on the other hand, kept spinning one "Shin" after another. It was ridiculous, I'm telling you. That dreidel must'd been loaded. Even M eventually exclaimed (again, with great drama): "Why does Mama always get shin?!" Which was, if you think about it, a hilarious question.

So after a while M ended up winning all the chocolate coins. But he did share his wealth with us and then with all his friends who come over to our place. This new generous and very polite (says "please" and "thank you" all the time) M is really a joy!

Lego Stuff

2012-12-17T19:58:00.001-08:00

Last week M had his first real Junior First Lego League showcase. The JrFLL team he was on, The Lego Bat Panthers, presented their solution for the Super Seniors challenge.

From the description of the challenge on the JrFLL page:

Can Junior FIRST^® LEGO^® League teams improve the quality of life for seniors by learning about the obstacles some people face as they get older?

M's team of 6, most of them - under 6, had a tough time choosing just one quality of life aspect. Instead, they decided to create a solution for ALL the potential problems faced by seniors. As a result, they created a robot-butler (M keeps calling it "robot-bocaler").

Essentially, it's a motorized contraption that does just about anything a person might want or need to do daily. It has attachments for cooking, cleaning, vacuuming, dusting, bringing groceries from cars, digging garden beds, and blasting off door handles. Yep, that's, they all agreed, was the coolest way to solve the problem of door knobs (since, as they learned, seniors develop arthritis that makes it painful and difficult to twist door knobs). Unwittingly, they recreated the awesome SIMON, Lara Croft's robot from the Tomb Raider movie.

As part of the showcase, the team had to come up with the name, the T-shirt design, and put together a poster about their work. The name, Lego Bat Panthers, might seem strange unless you have experience negotiating a team name with a group of boys, each of whom has just the greatest idea for it. So then you take one word from each terrific idea and string it all together and voila, they miraculously agree on it.

Now, the T-shirts were largely designed by moms, but kids did vote on the color, the font and the idea of having flames. The bat panther iron-ons were added to the sleeves. And the poster... well, we took the easy way out. Each child chose photos he liked from a pile of photos taken during the JrFLL meetings. They cut them out and also colored the words in the team's name. Then they drew the pictures of other awesome robot-butlers. None of the kids wanted to deal with the messy and sticky glue, so the gluing down part was done mostly by the moms.

Then it was the showcase time. During the showcase, the kids have to be able to answer questions from the panel of judges and tell a bit about their team and their project. I wasn't there to see it, so not sure how it went. M really dislikes this part. He just wants to build, not talk about it with strangers, lol.

Back home, M built his own, smaller and non-motorized, version of the robot-butler. So that was really cool. He also discovered the Lego YouTube channel. First, he kept watching Lego Star Wars episodes which are hilarious, I must admit. Inspired, he started building Lego scenes. The latest (I don't have a picture) is called "Imperial troopers are having lunch break while building a new base on the planet Hoth".

But then he wanted to watch all the Hero Factory episodes which are not at all funny 'cause they are basically just commercials for the Hero Factory stuff. So now he's spends all his spare time playing with his Heroes. He even built them their own Hero Factory. It has the production floor where Heroes are assembled and their quaza cores are inserted (I did help a bit with some of the machines here). There's also the control room for Zib and Quaddle. This room has lots of computers and important buttons, but also a solar panel and some garbage and recycling cans. Heroes also have a spacecraft.

But the masterpiece of the setup is the high security jail. It has 4 cells for villains and has detection and alarm lasers. It's very strong and well-guarded. Unfortunately, villains escape from it on average 10 times an hour. So the Heroes are always busy chasing them and/or improving the jail.

M doesn't know yet, but he's getting more Legos for the holidays, including lots of gears, a motor and a battery pack. Hooray!

Our Giant Deck and Other Projects

2012-12-17T19:16:00.004-08:00

I usually don't write much about Chris. Mostly it's because he spent the entire year deployed. But now that he's back, he's catching up on a whole lot of different house projects. Ah, home, sweet home!

The two major things going on are the yard and the deck. First, I'm going to show you the yard project. Basically, I we decided to move the veggie garden from the front yard into the side yard. A couple of years ago we (and now I do mean "we") cleared the area of all the overgrown bushes and ivy and covered with black plastic (big mistake). So all we needed to do now was to get rid of ~~weeds~~ torn plastic, break the heavy clay soil and clear it off as many roots and rocks as possible.

Oh, and also, we Chris needed to tear down the old rusted through metal shed (see what's left of it laying on the ground?). Which meant he had to drag all the rotten and rusty junk out of it first. Only after all this prep could he start building new raised beds.

But after the first two beds were built, we had to hit the pause button on this project. That's because we decided to cut down a maple tree (shucks, wish it was pine). It was a good tree, but it was shading a large part of the garden and, more importantly, leaning over the fence into the neighbor's yard. So we decided to be nice and neighborly and take care of this issue.

Since the tree cutting company had a 2-week lead time, Chris decided to start on the mega project of refinishing the deck. This project has been at least 5 years overdue. But you see, we have a huge deck - 3 levels (used to be 4, but we tore one down 'cause it was built right on the ground and rotted through by the time we bought the house). The lowest quote we ever got for refinishing the deck was $2500 + materials.

Actually, the deck looked so ugly that I thought there was not a chance it'd ever look good again. I thought we'd need a new deck altogether. Good thing I have my hubby who's not as panicky about things. When faced with a challenge, he usually reaches for the nearest instrument of destruction - a hammer, a chainsaw, a power washer - and gets right to work.

And that's exactly what he did this time around. First, he removed the horrible lattice and sanded the railing all around. We figured, trying to sand all those 2x2s was too much of a pain in the neck. It was easier (and saner) to just replace them with the new ones. Luckily, whoever built our deck, had no idea about building codes. So they spaced those 2x2s too far apart and, as we were told, not safe for children. Now that our child is old enough to know better, we had a lot fewer 2x2s to replace. Hooray for incompetent builders!

The belt sander did a terrific job on the railings. But we needed something bigger and better for the deck floors. Turns out, you can't use regular big floor sander on a deck. Something about the nails or whatever. Instead, we had to rent a power washer. Which was a bit of an issue 'cause you know how little our car is. There was no way a power washer could fit in the trunk. Since the rental place is within walking distance from us, Chris considered walking the washer to the house or, better yet, I'd drive and he'd pull the washer alongside the car. For some reason the rental place folks didn't like this plan. Instead, they decided to deliver the washer themselves. Whatever...

Power washing must be a whole lot of fun... for guys. I mean, I don't care for it one way or another. But both Chris and M were thrilled. What's the big attraction? Beats me. But it was pretty cool to watch them work. Especially Chris since M left after just a few minutes and went back to his toys.

Anywho, the washer was excellent. Turns out, our deck wasn't rotten after all. It was just incredibly dirty. Once all that grime was taken care of, we had a very nice red oak deck. Who knew?!

Then we had to wait for the deck to dry so Chris could put stain on it. So we spent a lot of time looking at different stains. Unlike paints, stains don't have attractive names. So I chose the one that sounded the prettiest, Cinnamon. Makes you think of all the wonderfully delicious breakfasts, lunches and dinners out on the finished deck. And the picture in the brochure looked nice too.

But stains are trickier than paints. Turns out, they look different on different wood. So this one had a whole lot of red in it to M's delight. I'm ok with it 'cause you know, it's still a ton better than the old look.

It took Chris more than a week to finish staining the deck. Mostly because all of a sudden the weather turned rainy. And the local weather forecast tends to predict just the opposite of what the weather is really like. But eventually the deck was finished with two coats of stain. And it looks wonderful and amazing and unrecognizable! It better, I say, 'cause it took 5 gallons of stain. We had to go to Lowe's for more stain like 3 times. The guy at the paint counter must've thought we have no idea how to calculate the area; we do, but our deck soaks it all up.

But again, it looks amazing! Come check it out if you're in the area. Oh, and if you have an old crummy deck, Chris says he'll help you get it in tip-top shape... at a competitive price.

Except right now he's a bit busy with the veg garden again. The tree cutting company came out and cut down the maple. We are keeping the logs for yet another project (more on this when it actually happens, but it'll be very handsome!) The final raised bed should be finished in a day or two. Then - the new compost bin and a gravel path along the veg garden. I'll post pictures as soon as that's done.

Osso Bucco? Osso "Bleh"-cco!!!

2012-12-02T19:38:00.002-08:00

I already mentioned that I picked up Tim Ferriss' new book, The 4-Hour Chef, with a hope to finally learn how to cook without recipes. Well, this is the end of Week 1 of actual cooking and here's my update.

This week I was supposed to make two dishes - lamb "osso bucco" and scrambled eggs.

Osso Bucco was a definite FAIL. I did follow the recipe. And I did buy all the right (namely, fresh and/or organic) ingredients. I even used the same brand of canned tomatoes. Yet the end result was disappointing. It looked good, but tasted fatty and flat. Not a good combination. Then again, I never tried lamb before and, in general, I don't like meat all that much.

There was also a WHOLE LOT of braising liquid left. I felt it would be too wasteful to just get rid of it. And from my previous experience (mostly reading "Stone Soup" and the part in "Three in a Boat Not Counting the Dog" where Jerome K Jerome talks about Irish ragu), I knew that just about anything can be turned into a delicious soup.

I kept the broth and the day after I boiled it with the remaining carrots, some orzo, canned tomatoes, and leftover chopped lamb meat. Oh, and more salt and pepper. Now it tasted much better, but still it was missing something. Luckily, I remembered a jar of аджика (Georgian chili paste) in my fridge and added some to the soup. That did it! Now it tasted just right and somewhat like харчо. Must'd been хмели-сунели spice blend that was one of the ingredients in the chili paste (the rest were just various chilies, garlic and salt).

Scrambled eggs - I did not have fried parsley for the Middle Eastern version and I didn't feel like eating eggs with mint (the Northeast African version). Instead, I added scallions, fresh ginger and some soy sauce for an Asian take on scrambled eggs. I totally eyeballed the spices too. But the eggs turned out great. I don't know why I never considered adding herbs and spices to the scrambled eggs at the end, instead of at the beginning of cooking them.

Lessons learned:

1. Lamb - not for me
2. There are no shortcuts to building layers of flavor in a dish
3. If it doesn't turn out all that great, make a soup out of it
4. Scrambled eggs with soy sauce - delicious!

Still Learning to Cook

2012-11-26T13:42:00.002-08:00

You'd think that after about 10 years of marriage, I'd learn how to cook. Nope, not even close! I mean, I've come a long way since Chris and I first moved in together. Back then my specialty was salads and pasta (plain or with a sauce out of a jar). Now I can get an entire Thanksgiving dinner ready without much flipping out. And it'll be delicious as long as I have a good recipe to go by (yeah, I'm shacking my finger at you, Paula "One-Stick-of-Butter" Dean; your cornbread stuffing was a #fail).

And that's exactly the problem - the recipes. I can make just about anything given a recipe. But without one, I can't even make a Russian staple, fried potatoes with mushrooms. Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but just a bit. The bottom line is I CAN'T COOK WITHOUT RECIPES.

But this is about to change, I'm telling you! I'm working my way (very slowly) through Tim Ferriss' new book "The 4-Hour Chef". So far I'm loving it. I've just started reading about specific dishes and am yet to try the first one, but my cooking seems to have improved already. Like, we're still dealing with the left-over turkey. So last night I made spaghetti with turkey marinara (what would be a fancy name for this dish?). It was absolutely delicious, both Chris and M requested seconds and thirds.

Today I turned even more leftover turkey into a shepherd's pie. Again, delicious, and I almost didn't need a recipe for this one (I did use Alton Brown's recipe, but only as an inspiration and to know the proper oven temperature).

The nice thing is that so far, not counting the cost of the 4-Hour Chef book itself, it hasn't cost me a penny more to cook better food. But things are about to change as I'm approaching the first how-to of the book - Osso Bucco.

Islands

2012-11-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

Lately M's been very busy building islands. I forgot how it all started, but next thing I knew he build the first island - just a few stones with a couple of angry birds stranded on top of one.

Then shortly after Chris got back, M decided to build a Family Island. So he got out all the stones he collected during our list trip to NY, added some tree rounds, pine cones, tree bark to the mix, and put up a lighthouse and a windmill and populated the island with as many toy animals that would fit on it.

Almost immediately he decided to build a larger island for more animals and with plenty of room for the boats to dock. He also decided that his two collectible angry birds will swim to the island in a shell boat.

Then came the island of Every Kind of Animal and Astronauts and Aliens Island.

After the flamboyancy of the Every Kind of Animal island came the minimalist and uninhabited Three Bridges Island...

... which didn't stay uninhabited for too long .

Check out the awesome bat on top of the lighthouse! And the penguin isn't bad either.

Then a TIE-fighter landed...

And the island became deserted once again.

LEGO mini-figs were the late-comers, but they quickly got rid of all the non-essentials, installed a lawn for sunbathing and running around...

... and built a rocket launch pad.

Last I've heard, the TIE-fighter left the Dark Side and instead joined the mini-figs in their space exploration quest.

Homeschool Catch-up Post

2012-11-24T20:35:00.000-08:00

Yes, we are still homeschooling. And no, we aren't planning to change it just yet. So lots of things are going on in our little school and lots of new stuff. The big news is that I'm now teaching M English reading. Phonics sounded too crazy for me, so instead I settled on a book called "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" and I absolutely love it (so far).

We've done just over 30 lessons and M reads! He reads words, sentences and even short stories. And he understands what he reads without relying on a picture. Besides, his reading is very smooth and he blends the sounds well (better than he does in Russian, actually). This book is so simple to use! It provides very clear step-by-step instructions for parents and there's like no prep time for the lessons.

I'm also greatly relieved that with the DISTAR method used in the book we don't need to worry about sight words. One of the reasons I wanted to homeschool was to avoid just this type of rote learning ever-present in alphabet songs, rote counting to ten and back and sight words.

I was a bit worried that starting English with him would interfere with his Russian reading especially since his progress was so uncertain. So far it doesn't look as if it does. There were a few times that he mixed up Russian and English sounds. But I realized that if I teach English first, then - math, then a longish (an hour or so) break before teaching Russian, it helped. Another thing that helped was reminding M which language we were practicing reading.

One of the totally unexpected things about introducing English reading was that it actually helped M blend sounds better when reading Russian. Now he almost never reads individual letters, but instead the entire syllables which makes for much faster reading and better comprehension.

Last time I was in NY, I picked up this reading workbook at the Russian store. It's for kids ages 5-6 and M is finding it pretty easy (we end up skipping some of the easier exercises). But the book cover says that it's for "gifted children". Hmm... maybe they are playing to the parents' vanity. I don't let this get to my head. For now we practice lots of two- and three-syllable words and play games that work on fluency and actually reading a word vs guessing it.

And, of course, we also do math. I set aside the RightStart book for now. He was doing very well with geometry, but not so good with number facts past 7. So I decided to back up a bit, work on very basic stuff, like adding by 1, number facts to 5, etc. It's a bit frustrating for sure. Especially since if I replace numbers with any other symbols, he gets it and adds and subtracts without any difficulty.

At the same time, M's been intensely interested in very big numbers - a million, a billion and a trillion. He keeps asking me to re-read the "How Much Is a Million" to him. But more about this one some other time.

Apart from the homeschool, he's been busy at his Jr First Lego League and also at home building vehicles and Star Wars scenes with Legos, making islands, helping Chris in the yard and playing with friends.

Epic Climb

2012-11-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

On Day 2 of our stay in NE, Chris got it into his head to climb a tree in Grandma's backyard. I guess, raking leaves was getting to be too boring. Fortunately, I was there to take pictures of his fit of strength.

"Not sure what got into me, but I can totally do it! Totally!"

"It ain't nothing. I work out!"

"Hey babe, check this out! Told ya I could do it!"

"Crap, this is pretty high to jump down from"

"No worries, I'll figure something out. Will try climbing down the other side"

"Hmm, the other side is also pretty high... Ok, gotta go back the same way, I guess"

"If this was yoga, this would've been a Panda-asana."

"It'd suck to fall and break a leg. Should I tuck and roll?"

"The Eagle has landed!"

Nebraska in November

2012-11-11T12:30:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you one thing about going to Nebraska - it's a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG drive! How long? Well, let's put it this way - at some point half through the drive, M voluntarily gave me the iPad back saying that he had enough of it. So you can imagine what the second half of the drive was like in terms of the frequency of the "Are we there yet" and "I'm bored!" sentences.

To be fair, M didn't just play on an iPad all the time (I wouldn't let it happen no matter how many "Are we there yet" he threw at me). He spent a lot of time drawing too. On the way there it was mostly Star Wars stuff. But on the way back it was all about dinosaurs, dinosaur bones and him and his friends digging up dinosaurs. And he took lots and lots of pictures of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa... all looking pretty much the same.

The highlight of the trip there (for me) was seeing a trailer hauling a wind turbine blade. The thing is unbelievably huge and absolutely beautiful, especially up close.

M loves taking pictures. He's careful enough that I trust him with my cheapie camera. He doesn't know how to navigate through the menus or, say, turn the flash or the macro options on and off. And sometimes his hands shake so much that the pictures come out impossibly blurry. But other times he takes great pictures! The best part is he is not at all afraid to find just the perfect spot for the picture, even if it means crawling under furniture or climbing up on the kitchen table. And he rarely takes "a picture of everything", preferring to focus on just one or two elements at a time. The downside is he takes A LOT of pictures. I mean, hundreds. Which makes my job of sorting through them that much longer.

But I digress... By the end of the drive to Lincoln, M was so sick of being on the road and so bored, that he kept saying how he wasn't going to be nice to Nebraska and how he was going to not like it and kick it. And how he wasn't going to talk to anyone in Nebraska.

And then we got to Grandma Phyllis's house and parked the car and M looked around and said "And you dragged me here for this?!" But then two things happened. One was M got to go out into the yard and play in a huge pile of leaves. And then he got to eat spaghetti for dinner. Well, actually there was a third thing - M got to see, touch and pretend-call a friend on a very old telephone that was hanging on the wall downstairs right above a huge old wooden trunk (M's dream possession). All this was just too great to stay mad. So M cheered up and even conceded that "Nebraska was turning out to be better than he thought".

Then the next day M got introduced to American football as we spent the afternoon with Chris's family watching the game on a humongous TV, the biggest TV M has ever seen. At first he was bored with the whole thing. After all, we don't have a TV set at home and he's not used to watching anything, not even cartoons, much. Plus he's never seen American football before. But by the end of the evening he said he understood what the game was all about and liked it. And the next day he came over to me and asked me to switch the TV channel to a game.

Honestly, I don't care much about football. Yeah, it's an American thing and all and maybe I should learn a bit more about the game. But it seems pretty boring even compared to soccer (which I don't care much for either). Still, I must say that I had a great time at Aunt Sharon and Uncle Sam's house spending time with the family. Too bad we had to leave kinda early 'cause M was so tired that he actually kept asking to go to bed (another first).

Over the next two days we didn't do much. One day we went to this little museum on the U of N campus. It was terrific. We were in luck 'cause they had some kind of Science Sunday event with all the fun activities for kids. The best one, IMHO and according to M, was the one about making edible scat (that's animal poop, in case you don't know). I always knew Tootsie Rolls were good for something.

M was absolutely in love with the place. And that was just after looking at mastodons and dinosaurs and trilobites on the first floor (and making edible poop). Then we got to the second floor where they have a great collection of rocks and minerals. Oh, boy!!! I think if M could stay there overnight, he would had. He was all teary-eyed when we had to leave 'cause the place was closing for the day. The next day he kept asking to go back.

But instead we went to the zoo in Omaha. And we spent pretty much the whole entire day there. I love that zoo. Except I never get to see it when the weather is warm. Seriously, I've been there 3 times - in the winter, in late fall and in early spring. And each time it was cold and miserable. So I haven't seen the entire zoo, not yet anyway. But what I've seen is really terrific. And M seems to agree, mostly.

The very first place he wanted to see was, of course, the Desert Dome. It's the most visible structure as you drive up to the zoo and it looks so cool too! At first M wanted to see and take pictures of everything there - the cacti, the birds, the "cave paintings", the snakes, the meerkats and so forth. But after about 20 minutes or so he started to get overwhelmed and was ready to move on.

And so we braved the cold and wet weather and went to see the big cats (tigers were having lunch of what looked like chopped steak), the orangutans, the gorillas and the giraffes. Of all these, M seemed to be most interested in gorillas mostly because they had a baby gorilla who kept trying to annoy the daddy gorilla. Plus in the same structure there were displayed skeletons of various primates for comparison. M spent quite some time in front of them, discussing the difference between human and gorilla skeletons.

Then we went to the aquarium. And that was pretty much it. Once we got inside, M did not want to leave. He just wanted to look at everything over and over and over. And when he got to the end of the aquarium, he wanted to start the tour all over again. He tried taking pictures, but that was tricky because of the lighting. So he asked me to do it and kept pointing to hundreds of fish and corals and anemones, asking to photograph them all. Apparently he had this idea that once home, we'll print all those pictures, cut out all the fish, etc, glue them to blue paper and we'll have our own aquarium.

After we took pictures of every fish in the aquarium... twice, we all went to eat at a cafe in the Lied Jungle pavilion. It's definitely the best place to eat at the zoo. The food is actually good and not at all expensive. And you can get a table with a great view of the family of monkeys. That's exactly what we did. It was great, watching Mama Monkey, Papa Monkey and their two kids. Except M got it into his head to act like those baby monkeys for the rest of the day which was funny only for the first 10 minutes or so.

We then tried going through the Jungle pavilion which is my favorite place at the zoo. Except M was dead-set on going back to the Aquarium. So after just 2 minutes in the jungle he asked мама, ты уже наджунглилась? And after another 5 minutes or so he started the "Are we there (at the exit) yet?". Which turned the whole thing into an exercise in parental restraint. So we turned around and went back to the aquarium... and, of course, to the gift shop.

On the way back from the zoo I noticed a sign for the Strategic Air and Space Museum. But I kept quiet because it was already around 4pm (and the museum closes at 5pm). Pitty. But maybe next time. Besides, they do not allow kids under 48" tall on their multi-axis trainer rides and M would'd been pretty unhappy. He tried this ride back in NY and loved it. I finally found a video of it.

And the next day it was time to drive back to NC. Another two-day drive, grrr. This time it was especially long for some reason. Missouri seemed absolutely endless! But then, late in the evening on the second day we finally got home. As Dorothy would've said "There's no place like home!"

Home for Halloween

2012-11-10T18:48:00.003-08:00

Home for Halloween... For a whole year this was my standard response to M's endless questions about when would Chris get back "from the Army". And whadda ya know! He did get home just a few days before the Halloween! (Ok, so it was fairly easy to predict since Chris left last year right before Halloween, but still, things happen and we didn't know the exact date until the very last moment).

Once we knew the exact date, we had just about enough time to rent a car, get M into his astronaut costume and drive to Greensboro airport. Why astronaut costume, you ask? Well, first M said that since Papa was going to be wearing his Army uniform, it's only fair that M would wear his astronaut uniform as well. Once we got to Greensboro, M saw that some of the families there had Welcome Home signs. So he said "See, Mama, I'm wearing this spacesuit and Papa will see me right away, better than if I had a sign". Which was definitely true.

So Chris was home in time for going to a pumpkin patch and taking M trick-or-treating on Halloween night (that was something M was REALLY looking forward to for months).

The pumpkin patch we all went to was new to us and it just might be the best one around here. It has so much stuff - animals, a giant slide, an air pillow (also giant), hay to jump in, hay to slide off of, hay rides, a little castle thingy to run around, a train, and a ton of other things.

It was a very cold day though and we didn't stay for too long. Just long enough to do the most fun things and to pick pumpkins.

Chris and M then carved one of the pumpkins before going trick-o-treating. This year M actually helped to scoop the seeds out. You see, last year he absolutely refused to get his hands into the pumpkin or touch the "gobly-goop" inside. But this year he came up with this idea of creating a mitten out of a Ziploc bag.

And then, the day after Halloween we left for Nebraska, to see Chris's family. But that's another story.

Random Pics from NY

2012-11-04T20:44:00.002-08:00

Wild mushrooms around my parents' house. Some are edible. These aren't. But they are huge and pretty.

How huge? Well, here's M's foot for comparison.

Here are M and Grandma tasting apples at an orchard down the road from my parents' house. We went to pick apples there again this year.

This is M getting ready to go through some astronaut training at the Space Festival. He loved it and wasn't at all scared!

M and Grandma are about to enjoy their breakfast at Erik's in Long Island. Delicious!

M took this picture of me and I didn't even know. It's also at Erik's. I must'd already finished my breakfast (look at those chubby cheeks).

Collecting Rocks and Shells

2012-11-04T20:36:00.002-08:00

Has it really been over a month since I last updated this blog?! Wow! That's all I can say. But things have been happening around here, as you know. It all started with a trip to NY. This time around I talked my mom into going on a little get-away to Long Island, just for a couple of nights.

The first evening we were there the weather was ok, but kind of cold. So we went to the little beach just across the street from our motel and picked some rocks and shells. And then went out to get some din-din - some seriously delicious roasted chicken.

What can I say... The old adage "never leave for tomorrow what you can do today" proved itself true again! Our first evening in LI we only spent about 30 minutes or so on the beach thinking that we'd go there first thing the next morning. Except it rained hard overnight and the entire morning and early afternoon. Basically, we were stuck in our motel room.

And let me tell you about this motel room. It was a LivingSocial special and seemed like a really good deal. "Seemed" is a key word here. It was absolutely bare bones as far as comfort and coziness goes. I mean, it was worse than a Super 8 motel (and those are pretty basic).

Anyway, I thought that M was going to drive us (me) nuts sitting in the room with absolutely nothing to do (no Internet connection, bad TV reception, no toys, just one book for bedtime reading). But I was VERY wrong. In fact, he spent the entire first half of the day absorbed in sorting through and re-arranging the rocks and shells he collected the evening before, taking pictures of them, and drawing them. He was so busy and so in the flow, that it took me some effort to persuade him to leave the room once the rain stopped. I had to promise him more rocks and shells.

Once the rain stopped, the day was just amazing - sunny and even warm. We drove all the way to Orient and checked out the pebbly beach there and watched cars driving on and off the big ferries. Then we went to a great little cafe that served excellent Manhattan chowder and jumbo shrimp. We also discovered a lighthouse and a nearby beach with lots of little pieces of sea glass. And late in the evening we went to dinner at some restaurant that came highly recommended, but turned out to be pricey, but very average. But all in all, it was a terrific day and we were very happy.

The next morning, after checking out of the motel, we were in no hurry to leave Long Island. M wanted to collect more rocks. I wanted more sea glass. Mom wanted more shells. And we all wanted a good breakfast. Luckily, the lunch place from the day before also served breakfast and was close to the sea glass beach. In case you go, the place is called Erik's Breakfast and Lunch.

M could hardly wait to get to the beach and look for treasure. And boy, did he find something totally awesome. Ok, so for days before going to LI, M wanted to talk about all the things we might find on the beach - rocks, shells, sea weed, crabs, more shells, more rocks, sea glass, driftwood and on and on. I told him that maybe he'll see something unexpected and surprising. Guess what he found? He found an old buoy, plastic with peeling black paint and the number 1090 on its side. How could he not take it home with him?!

Lemme tell you - for the next few days this buoy was the most taken care of buoy in the Universe. M painted it black and red. He introduced it to all the toys. He took it on all the car rides. And, on the way home to NC, he even took him into an IHOP for lunch!

For me the most unexpected thing about the trip was all the farms and vineyards we saw along the way. We stopped at a couple of farms and farm stands to buy the beautiful fresh produce, fresh-pressed apple cider and award-winning cheesecakes. And on the way back home we stopped by the farm called The Garden of Eve. They have just about the best playground (and it's free), complete with a maze, a dirt track (little racing bikes are also free), a giant spider web, and a fort.

Even with the cold and the wind and the rain and even with the nightmarish NY traffic we got stuck in on the way back, it was still a terrific little vacation!

Prehistoric People and the Fourth Bear

2012-09-21T21:20:00.004-07:00

These are the books we've read (or flipped through and discussed) last week.

Baby Mammoth Mummy: Frozen in Time! - Somehow our library doesn't seem to have a lot of books about mammoths and woolly rhinos and other large prehistoric animals our prehistoric forefathers hunted. But this book was available and it was great. Sure, the story of a little mammoth drowning in a bog is a bit sad, but the story about how she was found and studied was absolutely fascinating. We did not read the whole book, just bits and pieces. And we watched a YouTube video about how Lyuba was found. A couple of great things about a video - it showed the Nenets dwellings that looked just like prehistoric dwellings and M was surprised to hear people in the video speak Russian.

What Do We Know About Prehistoric People - This is a great book. It is written in a Question and Answer format, so you don't have to read the whole book if you only want to know the answer to "Did prehistoric people go to the doctor?" or "What did prehistoric people do in their spare time?" Each chapter is very well illustrated and each illustration has a detailed explanation. So it's a great book to explore with little kids.

DK Eyewitness Book: Early Humans - M mostly looks through pictures in this book and I copy some pages for M to cut and glue into his lapbook. We have not yet looked through the entire book. DK books are heavy on facts and are written for older children. So we just pick and choose.

It's Disgusting and We Ate It - this is such an enjoyable book that talks about all the weird and disgusting (to some) foods from different regions of the world and from different times in history. There are a few foods that we didn't think all that disgusting, such as seaweed and caviar. Then again, to some people a snack of a dried ocean vegetable and raw fish eggs might sound a bit strange. Sort of like deep fried scorpions and earthworm soup sound to us. Besides, we all might be eating mealworms in the not-so-distant future. Hey, at the BugFest folks were eating and liking mealworms already (crunchy, they said).

If You Decide to Go to the Moon - In our non-prehistoric and non-bug related books, we found this gem at the library. The story takes you on a trip to the Moon and tells you step by step what you will be doing and how you might be feeling throughout the journey. I don't know what it is about this book, but it really makes you feel how lifeless and empty the Moon is.

For M's nighttime story we've been re-reading the Жили-были кролики books for the upteenth time. But I don't mind at all. The stories are simple, but kind and the illustrations are so beautifully detailed! Turns out, there are two more books in the series and as soon as they are available on Lookomorie.com, I'll be ordering them.

Oh, yeah, and The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde was the book that I occupied myself with last week. Loved every line of it too!

Homeschool K/1 - Week 4

2012-09-21T20:42:00.000-07:00

Things are a bit calmer this week and we are hitting our stride with this whole homeschooling thing. So yes, we had another good week of homeschooling almost devoid of frustrating experiences. The field trip of the week was BugFest (we actually went the Saturday before Week 4). Nope, we didn't eat any bugs, but we did watch people eat them and asked for their reviews (thumbs up for brownies with crunchy crickets and thumbs down for hotdogs with mushy worms). M didn't care for a taste of that and preferred a regular hotdog and an ice-cream.

This is what we did this week:

Math

Геометрия для малышей (Geometry for the Little Ones) - we are continuing reading and working through this book. The more we read, the more I like it. M seems to be warming up to it as well. This week's theme was angles - what are they and how do we compare them. At first M's idea was that a larger angle of the two is the one with the longest sides. That's why, when I asked him to draw an angle larger than the one I drew, he drew a smaller one, but with longer sides. We cut the two out and superimposed them onto each other.

Geoboard - we played a bit with the geoboard this week. I asked M to make different-sized squares and rectangles that were not squares. He also made a couple of designs of his own with squares and triangles.

With all the geometry work we've been doing lately, M's noticing it everywhere - a very long and rather straight crack in the blacktop was a "straight line, but it's not really very straight". He explains that if he was to draw a line between two stars, he would get "a segment of a line". He points out "a circle inside a square" on the way to the playground (a manhole cover in a raised square of blacktop). He's been on this geometry finding quest for a few days now. I gotta remember to take a camera with us wherever we go and let him take pictures of his finds.

The Tower of Hanoi - I got a real Tower of Hanoi puzzle. It's very pretty and M was eager to play. He actually asked me if he could play with it. I simplified the problem by leaving only 3 circles on it. I had to remind M the rules a couple of times, but after a couple of minutes he did solve the puzzle! Although next time he tried it, he seemed to be a bit lost. He eventually solved it again, but got frustrated and didn't want to play it any more.

Adding/subtracting - it's a simple game in which I start by placing 4 popsicle sticks in front of M so he can see them. I then cover them and show M two more sticks. I tell him that I'm adding these two to the other 4 and ask how many are there now. He has to figure out the total without seeing the sticks. Whatever answer he gives, I do not correct him, but just show him the sticks and he checks himself. So I continue adding/removing 1-2 sticks at a time in this way. He is usually very good at this game, except when we get to 9 sticks. This is the number that he has a lot of problems with right now.

Yellow is the Sun - speaking of numbers, the RightStart Math curriculum that we use teaches a counting song "Yellow is the Sun". I did not do it because it's in English and M doesn't want me to mix English and Russian in the same lesson (something I totally support). But M was having a very hard time remembering that 7 is 5+2, 8 is 5+3, etc to 10. So I came up with my Russian version of the song. It starts with В мусорке бензин... (A garbage truck has gasoline...) As silly as it is, it's really helping.

Double Doodle Zoo - this is a game from the Moebius Noodles book I'm working on with Maria Drujkova of Natural Math. The game is so simple to play. Just fold a piece of paper once (any which way you wish) and doodle on it so that at least some of the doodle is touching the fold. Then cut out the doodle and unfold it. Enjoy and explore the wonderful symmetry. In our experience, it's hard to stop at just one doodle. M always wants to make more. So on the next few, I ask him questions - what does he think the new shape will look like if I cut out a rectangle here, a triangle there, a half-circle here or if I punch out a circle, how many will I have once we unfold the doodle. Another really awesome thing that happens is that the game doesn't stop once the doodle is cut out. First, we created a collage with my doodles and came up with a little story about it. Then M wanted to decorate his own doodles and worked on that for a while concentrating on making the designs as symmetrical as possible. He ended up making an alien in a T-shirt and a sparkling palace for his imaginary Electroworld (a world that exists entirely on discarded printed circuit boards).

Combinations - M loves the idea of secret messages and codes. So this was an opportunity for him to break a code that disarms a stink bomb. To break the code, he had to figure out as many combinations as possible of 3 dots - magenta, yellow and green - without repeating any single combination and without putting more than one dot of each color into each combination. He was very careful and kept checking himself. We then went over his combinations and realized that if we only rotated a couple of them 180 degrees... But since the dots represented the buttons on a keypad, we couldn't rotate them. We (and the world) lucked out this time.

Russian

Read and find - we read a few more poems by Чуковский and found some more syllables for the syllable house. It's filling up pretty fast.

On the road to the alphabet - we continued with this workbook. The exercises are rather repetitive, but they do help M to hear sounds within words more clearly.

Story-telling - we practiced telling stories, first by sequencing pictures and describing what was going on in them. Then I told M a couple of stories and role-played them. Then he told me slightly different (lengthier and more involved) stories with the same characters.

We also played a few games that reinforce the reading skills by getting M to read syllables. One of the games was called "a magic plate". I divided a cardboard "plate" into 8 segments and wrote one preposition on each of the segments. The idea was to roll a dice and then come up with a sentence that would include a preposition on which the dice fell. I went first.

The dice fell on "к" and I came up with a sentence Я подойду к кастрюле. Then M rolled "над", thought about it for a second and said Мне тоже надо подойти к кастрюле. It was way funny!

I tried a few more times, but each time he simply came up with a word that had the letter or the syllable in it and used that word in a sentence. So we dropped the game for now.

History

Lapbook - I would've never guessed, but turns out, M is totally into lapbooks. Just as long as we don't call it a lapbook. Instead, it's a book. We continued talking about prehistoric people. We read more books about them. We watched a few more videos, mostly about the Younger Dryas and about Lyuba the mammoth. And we looked at the bugs that prehistoric people might had eaten on the days when woolly mammoth was not on the menu.

And then M just wanted to make a book about all this. He asked to make copies of the different pages from all the different prehistory books we had. Then he spent quite a lot of time cutting the pictures out and gluing them into his book. He drew fire after watching this episode about Home erectus on History channel. We spoke about what a timeline is. He also read a few words such as "nomad", "hunter", "gatherer", "cave" and we discussed why they were important words for his book. M even wrote a couple of words! So it was a whole lot of work and it's not finished yet. More pages are to come.

I'm trying to get M to a) make a cover for his book and b) come up with a little story about a prehistoric boy's life. So far he's not too keen on either. He particularly objects to a cover since he says it's going to be a secret book and it should not look like a book when on a shelf. And he also says that his is more like a picture book or an encyclopedia, so no stories are needed.

And this was our week. How was yours?

Rude Elephant and Strength-less Cat

2012-09-21T19:26:00.002-07:00

M loves telling stories, usually about robots, Star Wars, or space exploration (or all three blended together). He frequently gets carried away and does not use full sentences or gives any background information about the characters or the setting. So his stories tend to be rather difficult to understand. So we are trying to work on a more structured story-telling.

First, I told M a story about a rude little Dinosaur that teased his friends, the calf Andryusha and the pig Yulia and called them names. I also used his toys to role-play the story. I then gave M the same toys and asked him to either repeat the story back to me or to come up with his own:

Невежливый слон

Однажды Андрюша, Юля и динозавр пошли искать сокровища. И вдруг им повстречалось большое животное. Это был слон. Он всегда грубо обращался со всеми зверями. И он сказал: "Привет, Юля-грязнуля! Привет, Андрюша-длинные уши! Привет, Динозавр-пинозавр!" Динозавр ам, и укусил слона. И слон прыгнул, засвистел. Это был сигнал. Динозавр сказал: "Кто там?" А слон сказал: "Ктотам-потам!" А Динозавр устал от этих дурацких шуток и упал.

Rude elephant

Once Andryusha the calf, Yulia the pig and a Dinosaur went to search for treasure. And all of a sudden they met a large animal. It was an elephant. He was always rude to all animals. And he said: "Hello, Yulia-the slop head! Hello, Andryusha the long ears! Hello, Dinosaur-Pinosaur!" Dinosaur hum and bit the elephant. And the elephant jumped and started whistling. It was a signal. Dinosaur said: "Who's there?" and the elephant said: "Whosthere-poosthere!" And Dinosaur got tired of these silly jokes and fell down.

The second story was told in much the same way, only the characters were different - a cat and a dog and they were building a see-saw in M's story (in my original story they were just carrying a board for a new house).

Бессильная кошка и собака
Шли-шли кошка и собачка. И тут они захотели соорудить прыгательные качели. Они взяли доску и бревнышко. Они положили бревнышко на землю и поверх доску положили. Качели были готовы. Собачка мирно стояла на качелях и тут кошка прыгнула на другой конец и бабах, собачка взлетела в воздух. Собачка сказала: "Давай соорудим какой-то домик." Собака и кошка попробовали поднять доску, но не смогли. Собака сказала: "У меня лапы устали" и кошка мяукнула. И они позвали теленка, динозавра и свинью, чтобы помочь им. Они помогли. А кошка стояла и говорила, куда класть доску.

A strength-less cat and a dog
A cat and a dog were walking. And then they wanted to make a jumping swing (a see-saw). They got a board and a log. They put a log on the ground and put a board on top. The see-saw was ready.The dog stood on the see-saw peacefully and then the cat jumped on the other end and boom, the dog flew up in the air. The dog said "Let's construct a house of some sort". The dog and the cat tried to lift a board, but couldn't. The dog said "My paws are tired" and the cat meowed. And they called the calf, the pig and the Dinosaur to help them. They helped. And the cat stood there and told them where to put the board.

Homeschool K/1 - Week 3

2012-09-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

Another week has gone by and let me tell you, it's been the craziest week this far. I honestly need a break from this much fun! The house is a mess since we spent minimal amount of time here, mostly just enough time to make a mess and leave, on our way to some exciting activity. And that was in addition to our regular schedule of physical, occupational and speech therapies.

It's been a great homeschooling week, this one. Not too many frustrating moments even though sometimes I felt a bit rushed. But at the same time, I started seeing M's progress in a few areas where he seemed "stuck" before, especially in arithmetic.

So this is what we did this week:

Math

We continue reading Геометрия для малышей (Geometry for the Little Ones). However, we haven't made as much progress as I hoped. I think it's mostly because M is not used to me reading books on a computer screen (and this one I could only get as rather poor quality scanned images of each page). We talked some more about line segments, parallel and perpendicular lines, and practiced using a compass to compare lengths of line segments.

Greedy Triangle - we read this book before a couple of times. But this time I brought out a mirror book and we role-played the story. I was the greedy triangle and M was the magician. M really enjoyed the game.

Now he's looking for shapes and lines, segments and rays everywhere. He also asked me to draw a quadrilateral for him and then spent quite a while making it "more mathematical" with lots of straight lines. He then gave me a little tour of his "mathematical quadrilateral", explaining about segments, parallel lines, lines that cross, short and long segments, etc, etc.

The Tower of Hanoi - I made my own with some Mega Blocks and explained the rules to M. But let me tell you, Mega Blocks aren't really good for this game. M kept trying to place blocks next to each other on top of the larger blocks. So I've ordered a normal Tower puzzle and we'll try it again soon.

Repeating activities - we've repeated some of the activities we've done in the previous 2 weeks. But I made them a bit more challenging. For example, here are the sorting cards. The idea is that M is given 4 cards and he has to sort them into 2 groups. Then he has to explain why he sorted them just so. Also, as you can see, there is more than one way to sort each set. So M has to find another way to sort. He was very good at this and also at Venn diagram.

Transitive property - I gave M some word problems that used transitive property ("if a > b and b>c then a>c). It went something like this: "A pot is larger than a tea kettle. And a tea kettle is larger than a cup. What is larger, a pot or a cup?" I gave him some simple ones like this to solve and some harder ones, not based in daily experiences. Each time I asked him to explain his answer. He did use the "because I experienced it before" argument once or twice (particularly, with the pot-kettle-cup problem), but mostly replied with "well, you said so yourself earlier - a was bigger/taller/faster/etc than the others". BTW, I take lots and lots of ideas from the wonderful Russian book Малыши и математика (The Little Ones and Mathematics).

RightStart Math - we are making progress with this curriculum. I really like it because it doesn't require M to write anything or trace numbers or color or do any such thing. Instead, he uses tally sticks, abacus, and his fingers to show numbers from 1 to 10. I also like how the program discourages counting and instead emphasizes number composition. M is still a bit shaky with 5+3 and 5+4, but he's getting much better. When I show him 7 fingers or put 10 tally sticks on the table, he no longer counts them one by one. Instead, he subitizes the 2 groups (say, 5 fingers on one hand and 2 on the other) and recalls that 5+2 is 7. Very cool. Me like it.

Memory game - this is the first time in a couple of years that M played a Memory game. I can't say that he liked it a lot since he had to match cards with numbers on them, except the numbers were shown as fingers on two hands. So he had to keep in mind quite a few things. But he did well enough and did not dislike the experience. So we'll play it some more.

Russian Language

Speech therapy - HUGE progress this week! Whether it was our daily 3-minute practice or me keeping my fingers crossed that did it, but M now rolls his "Р" sound (ok, that's R for all my non-Russian speaking friends). Russian R is notoriously difficult to master. M is nowhere near mastery, but he's moving in the right direction. Me very happy! He is very happy too since both me and his therapist are smiling these huge silly smiles every time we hear him roll it; he's got not one, but two prizes at the end of his session; and he got to eat pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner for one day!

Word lists - we finished another 2-sided page of words. I'm going to lay off of them for a little bit because he gets bored, yet he is not ready to read phrases.

On the road to alphabet - we did just 4 lessons this week. Now, why would I continue working on the alphabet with him if he already reads words? Well, there are a couple of letters he is a bit shaky with; the ones that aren't used very often. Also, this workbook has great exercises for recognizing different sounds within words and that's something M needs more practice with.

Read and find - ok, that's what I'm going to call this activity from now on, but that's not very descriptive. So, here's how to play it. First, I choose a story (something simple that he's heard before and with lots of characters in it). Then, I write the first letters of characters names (or first letters of magical objects or landmarks) on mini sticky notes. As I read M a story, I pause when a character is first mentioned and wait for M to find the corresponding sticky note (out of 10 or so). I stick it to the page of the book. At the end of the game we put the sticky notes into our syllable house.

Syllable house - that's something I added to our daily routine. Basically, it's a grid of sticky notes. Rows are for vowels; columns are for consonants. The cells are for syllables made up of these vowels and consonants. So M has to first read each syllable and then find its room (cell). I help him since there are no grid lines (I really should add those). I found that using sticky notes really cuts down on prep time (as opposed to drawing the whole thing on paper and then cutting out the syllable cards). He can't wait to fill the entire syllable house since he gets a prize at the end.

History

We are continuing with pre-history. SOTW only gives a very brief overview, so I'm relying on a combination of library books and my own memories (ok, I'm not THAT old, but I did participate in an archeological club when I was 10 or 11 and even presented a paper on Paleolithic hunter-gatherers). Oh, YouTube also helps a bit.

I found a few good short videos from "I, Caveman" show on Discovery's Curiosity channel. We watched them together and then talked a bit about what we saw. I was impressed that he remembered not just the word "nomad", but the meaning of it. He mentioned it after watching one of the episodes and then I overheard him explaining it to one of his toys.

We also looked through the Early Humans book. M commented on how the dwellings made of sticks and hides look warm and cozy and asked if we could build one in the yard. He then asked if we could possibly dig a small cave in the yard. Maybe when we're in NY, I'll take him on a hike to a small cave (really, just a rocky overhang), so he can play caveman for a bit.

Science

We haven't done much about rocks this week. In fact, the only thing was M's drawing explaining how volcanic rocks form.

Instead, M was once again playing with his garbage trucks. But I'm counting our tour of a landfill as science. He did learn even more about recycling, played a landfill bingo, and then explained all about leachate to his speech therapist.

I'm also counting him watching a couple of episodes of the Russian cartoon Пин Код (Pin Code) as science activity because not only did he watch the cartoon, but he recounted the story to me and drew a picture of an atom (below), showing the nucleus and electrons orbiting it.

Oh, and we did have Lego League with the theme of Super Seniors. The kids explored what it might feel like to get older and also what things were like 40, 50 and 60 years ago. M's group then attempted to build a bank branch out of Legos.

Another Lego thing that M built this week completely on his own was a chocolate factory. He listened to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory CD and loved the story. And then he built his little factory with lots and lots of buttons for "controlling mechanisms". Sweet!

My Very Socialized Homeschooler

2012-09-14T19:27:00.001-07:00

One of the main objections I hear from folks about homeschooling is lack of social interactions with peers. This comes mostly from people who know very little about homeschooling and are not tuned into a local HS community. I am of the opinion that M is getting plenty of socialization, sometimes too much of it.

For example, here's how this week went, in terms of all the socializing:

Monday morning we had a much-anticipated tour of a landfill. Yes, I know, we've been there already. But this is one tour M seems to want to go on over and over (ok, another one he wouldn't mind doing again and again would be anything NASA related). Sure, we don't go to a landfill every week, but we frequently go on field trips and outings with our homeschooling friends. I'd say, we go a couple of times a month.

Tuesday we started the new session of the Junior First Lego League. It's super exciting for a couple of reasons. One is M loves being there, building with Legos, playing with his friends and, of course, having a snack. Second, he got his first ever grant! It came from OurMilitaryKids.org and covered not only all the program fees, but also some nice bricks, gears, and a motor. Awesome, I say! That's 3-4 hrs of socializing, being engaged in cooperative play, problem solving, etc.

Wednesday is our usual get-together with a group of Russian kids. There's usually a short lesson - math, logic, Russian language, and an art activity. Then kids have a snack and go play. And moms have some tea. The kids have been meeting and playing together for over a year now, almost every week. They speak Russian between themselves (so far).

Thursday is our Russian reading night. It's with the same group of kids, but at a different time and the format is different too. There are some language-building activities and a short story time. But then kids have a snack and play together while moms have tea. Both Wednesday and Thursday get-togethers are organized and hosted by some absolutely amazing Russian moms who seem to have boundless reserves of energy, enthusiasm, teaching ideas and patience.

Friday is our homeschool park day. We didn't do it in the summer because it was just too hot. But now that the weather is a bit cooler, we are going to return to the park day. M gets to play with his American homeschooling friends.

In addition to all this, we usually have 2-3 small playdates each week, including weekends. That makes for a very full schedule. Now, we are very lucky to live in an area with so many homeschoolers and such an active HS community. Then again, M has plenty of non-HS friends too.

I realize that the pictures I put on this blog do not reflect any of this. Sometimes it's because I'm not there to take a picture (I'm either chatting with other moms, drinking tea or doing both at the same time; yep, I'm THAT talented). Other times I just don't feel it'd be right to put pictures of other kids on the blog for privacy reasons. But I also know we're not at all different from many other HS families in our area. With all the co-ops, playdates, clubs, park days, and such, kids here seem to get plenty of social opportunities.

Ok, I'm going to get off my soap box now.

Homeschool K/1 - Week 2

2012-09-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's only been 2 weeks! On the other hand, wow, it's been 2 weeks already! Not having any experience with the American public school system (except for my approximately 2 weeks in American high school 15 years ago), I am constantly worried whether M is learning enough "stuff". Which is probably very silly of me since I do understand that quality trumps quantity. Still, every day last week we completed our lessons in just under an hour. But M's little friends who started K this year go to school from 9:15am to 3:45pm! What am I missing?!

So this week, since M seemed to be doing just fine with the amount of work last week, I made some changes to our schedule. To begin with, I decided to do math and reading every day instead of alternating days. So Monday and Wednesday we did a lot of math and some reading. Then Tuesday and Thursday we did a lot of reading and some math. On Friday we did a bit of math and a bit of reading, but I'm keeping Fridays open for field trips, get-togethers, and family time.

Another thing I changed was I added 1-2 occupational and physical therapy games daily to M's schedule. That's even on the days when he has therapy sessions.

So, here's what we did during our second week of homeschool:

Math

Candy button math - we started the week with some candy math. First, we watched this How to Eat Candy Buttons Like a Recreational Mathemusician video by Vi Hart. I already had the candy button strips prepared. I reminded M a bit about Moebius strip and he started eating. After a few buttons he asked if I'd help him. So I suggested cutting the strip into two parts, so I'd have one and he'd have one. Obviously, we couldn't cut down the middle (we'd had to cut through buttons). Which led to very interesting and beautiful result. I'm not gonna spoil it for you and it's not in the video either. Just do it. It's fun.

What is bigger, a part or a whole - these were some questions I asked him, like "Are there more birds on Earth or ducks?" and "Are there more people or men?" M gave me correct answers on all, but had a bit of a hard time explaining the why of it. BTW, he even had no problem answering "Are there more quadrilaterals or rectangles out there? Are there more rectangles or squares out there?".

Magic squares - these are 3x3 squares with some stickers in some of the cells. Other cells are empty. The object of the puzzle is to figure out which stickers/pictures need to go into empty cells. We played this game twice this week, each time with 3 squares. The first time M had a bit of a problem figuring out that only 3 kinds of shapes or colors were allowed in a square. But once that hurdle was overcome, he breezed through the puzzles.

Divide quadrilaterals - another puzzle with the objective of figuring out how to draw one line across a quadrilateral in such a way that it would divide it into 2 triangles; 2 quadrilaterals; a quad and a triangle; and a pentagon and a triangle. M didn't solve all the puzzles here, but came up with an unexpected solution when he drew a zig-zagging line instead of a straight one. Another interesting moment was when in one of the puzzles he kept drawing lines across smaller and smaller shapes observing (with delight) and predicting the outcomes.

Zingo 1-2-3 - he's getting better at it. He seems to have less trouble identifying arrangements of 6,8, and 9 objects without counting. We are playing the green side of the cards for now (quantity recognition).

Patterns - I made up some simple patterns for him - ABBABBA and ABCABC - and had him predict what was going to be the next element in the pattern (I love colorful borders I picked up from a dollar store). No problem at all here and I think I'm going to move on to some more complicated and longer patterns next week.

Geometry - We started reading an old Russian book called Геометрия для малышей (Geometry for the Little Ones). As we read, we try different activities suggested in the story. Some of the terms and concepts we learned and reviewed this week were a straight line, a point, each line contains infinitely many points, line can be divided into infinite number of segments, segments two end points, a ray has one end point, vertical lines, horizontal lines, point of intersection of two lines, what's a plumb line and how it's used, how to draw a straight line through a point, through two points.

Quantities of 7 and 8 - last year, when I tried RightStart Math with M, that's where we stumbled and just couldn't move any further. For some reason he just wouldn't accept that 7 is 5+2 and 8 is 5+3 and had to count over and over again. So this week we spent some time practicing with all the different manipulatives, with abacus and fingers, to learn 7 and 8. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

Ordering by length - M finally got to use the set of Cuisinaire rods I got him a few months ago. I gave him 10 rods and asked to arrange from shortest to longest. He seemed to be absolutely fascinated by the process, but was done with it very quickly. So he asked if he could do it again, but from longest to shortest this time. Sure! Once that was done, he did another longest to shortest, this time placing the rods horizontally. Finally, he arranged them end-to-end in a line, again from longest to shortest.

(Somehow he figured how to take his own pictures with my camera. So here is his self-portrait with his two favorite transformers)

Russian Language

Speech Therapy - we continue doing 2-3 minutes daily of speech therapy exercises. Our логопед assures us that M is showing good progress. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

On the Road to Alphabet - this is the name of a Russian work book I use with M to review letters and letter sounds. We don't do every exercise, but we try to do at least 2-3 for each sound. Most are centered around listening to me pronouncing a word and figuring out whether a given sound is in this word and if yes, where is it - at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the word. Sometimes they have little puzzles and M seems to enjoy them. I do wish we had a more exciting book though.

Reading lists - every day M reads a list of 16-20 Russian words I write for him. I have to remind him to read syllables, not individual letters. Reading this week feels like one step forward, two steps back.

Memorization - I am trying to get M to memorize and recite back some simple rhymes. This week's rhyme is just 6 lines and is actually pretty funny. He doesn't like this work. So what I thought would take us a day to learn is taking 3 days already.

Summary - this is another new activity I'm trying (and something suggested by our American speech therapist). I read M a very short story (just one paragraph). He then tries to re-tell me the story and as he does so I'm writing it down. I then read him the original story and his summary. It's time consuming and M doesn't like it. But I think even after just a couple of times it's working. He is doing a bit better speaking in full sentences.

Fishing game - we have Russian magnetic letters, so I set up a simple fishing game. Since he already knows all the letters, the challenge was to create words out of his "catch". It was pretty difficult, so I helped, but he had to figure out the missing letters and fish for them.

Building letters with Legos - I set out a few magnetic letters in front of M and asked him to build the same letters out of Lego blocks. He really liked it and asked if we could build a whole entire word. So I scrambled the letters of a very simple word нет and asked him to put them in the proper order and then build the word out of Legos. He loved this game! I'm going to try some more. Looks like we need more simple Lego bricks and another plate.

(This is M's "Friendly Allien" picture. M explains: "It has a big smile, bit eyes, tiny hands and feet and an antenna")

Fine and Gross Motor Skills

Cutting with scissors - we did it as a math game called Special Snowflake. This is another game from the book I'm working on with a wonderful friend and mathematician, Maria Droujkova. You can actually see a snapshot of what the game pages in the book will look like here.

Mystery bag - this is a simple game of reaching into a bag with some small objects in it and figuring out by touch what it is.

Unscribbler - we play it on our chalkboard wall. So I draw a squiggly scribble on it with a yellow chalk first. Then M has to go over it with a red chalk without lifting his hand off the surface.

Lacing - I picked up some lacing cards at a dollar store a couple of weeks ago. M did his first lacing card last week and the second one this week. I'm happy to say that this week's work was a whole lot more accurate and was done faster! Way to go!

Tracing - I draw patterns of lines and dots on a sheet of paper with a marker. Then I turn the paper over and M traces the pattern with a marker or a pencil.

Marbles - ok, the way it's played is we sit on the floor across from each other. M has a plastic cup. I roll a small marble toward him and he has to catch it by covering it with a cup. We also tried kneeling on both knees, then on one knee.

Lazy baseball - M lays down on his back on a mat. I hold a light ball on a string above him. I tell him to swat the ball with either right hand or left hand and specify the place on the ball (side, front, bottom). It sounds simple, but it can be challenging to coordinate the movements to hit the ball just right.

History

We are continuing with the Story of the World book. This week we only read one part of the chapter about early people. I expected the story to start in Paleolithic Era, but instead it was set a mere 7 thousand years ago.

Some of the words and ideas M learned - nomads, Stone Age, prehistoric people, a tribe (племя in Russian which he immediately connected with племянник), hunter-gatherer life style.

We also talked some more about what archaeologists do and read Archaeologists Dig for Clues.

Science

We went to a friend with an idea of looking at their rock collection and exploring some of the properties of rocks (hardness, density, etc). Instead, the kids, M and my friend's son, had a playdate and didn't seem to be interested in rocks even a little bit.

Homeschoolers Fall Kickoff

2012-09-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

That's what we did this Friday. So we did a bit of school, but then went to a park for a mega playdate with about 100 other kids.

M had a blast riding on a merry-go-round for at least an hour non-stop and building with Legos for another hour. And in between he was running around with his buddies.

And I just did what moms do - talked to other homeschooling moms.

Homeschool K/1 - Week 1

2012-09-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

Our new homeschool year has started. M's been practically begging me to start "school" ever since the beginning of August. But I decided to wait 'til the official beginning of the school year in our county. The reason is simple - most of M's friends are not homeschoolers and are going to K this Fall. So the opportunities for playdates during the school year are going to be few and far in between. Synching our school calendars seems to increase our chances.

Here's what we did this week in our home school:

Math

When I asked M what it was he wanted to study this year, the first thing he said was "fun math". So I'm trying to keep it as interesting as possible for him. Some of the games we played this week:

Which object out of 4 is not like the others? Why? - It's important to ask the why question since M has no problem identifying an object, but stumbles explaining why he chose it. Also, as you can see, at least a couple of options are possible in each group based on different attributes (in this example above, the choice can be either R2D2 or Captain Cody).

Introducing Venn Diagram - I put two circles in front of M several inches apart from each other. I explained that I would give him some objects to sort. All the red objects would go into the red circle. All the bears would have to go into the blue circle. I also threw in some non-red non-bear objects to make sure he understands that they don't belong to either of the circles. No problem. Then I gave him a red bear. First, he put it in the red circle. Then, when I point out that it was not just red, but also a bear, he moved it to the blue circle. I countered that even though it was a bear, it was also red. After thinking for a couple of seconds, M moved the circles together so they overlapped and placed the bear appropriately. The rest was very easy. It was interesting to see how proud M was of figuring out the solution.

Mirror Legos - this is a symmetry game that we played before. I divided the Lego plate into two parts with a stud and explained that it was the line of symmetry. I then would build on one side and M had to build symmetrically on the other side. This was an easy game to him, so I switched roles and let him build and I mirrored (making mistakes, of course, and letting him correct me, something he really enjoyed).

Zingo 1-2-3 - it's a new game for us and I really like it so far. M loves the original Zingo, but this one is hard for him, especially for any quantities larger than 6. But it's really good practice too, so we will keep going.

Making geometric figures with drinking straws - I first saw the idea on Malke's Map Is Not the Territory blog. It's so easy. Just need some drinking straws and pipe cleaners to serve as connectors. Building was fun, but then a game emerged - we'd connect several straws in a zig-zag line and count the angles. We then would connect the first straw to the last and look at the resulting shape. Again, we'd count the angles (note that there will always be 1 more angle once the straws are connected). But the most fun came from bending the shape this way and that to see what other shapes were hidden inside. For example, a heptagon had a triangle and a quadrilateral hidden in it while a hexagon had two triangles, etc.

Live Mirror Game - some more symmetry, straight from Moebius Noodles. We played it before, but it's such a fun game that you just don't grow tired of it.

Reviewed the quantity of 6 - this was very easy for M and he had no problem showing it on an abacus and explaining that it's 5 + 1.

Russian Language

Speech Therapy exercises - we start each lesson with some exercises our wonderful Russian speech therapist showed us. M has already mastered the л and л' sounds (the hard and soft "l") and is now working on a much more challenging р and р' (the impossible Russian "r").

Letter yoga - we reviewed Russian vowels with some "spelling yoga" poses. This was fun for M and let me include some physical therapy activities into the schedule. Some letters were easier than others (А, О, У), some were very challenging.

Букварик (the ABC book) - we are re-reading the old ABC book, this time much faster and without stopping to do exercises. This is just a review, to make sure that he remembers all the letters (after a long summer break).

Grammar exercises - we have some Russian workbooks and I pick and choose from those. Instead of writing, I ask M to sort words (tokens I give him) into piles based on what letter he hears in them or clap his hands every time he hears a particular sound.

Reading lists - I've decided to ask M to read short (10-12 words) lists every lesson. Our first lists are very simple, CVC words. M had no problems with them. So I'm ready to move to harder ones.

Hands-on letters - this week we're working with vowels. M knows them well, but there are 2 that he is still shaky with - Е (he keeps saying it's an [ee], instead of [ye]) and Э (which for some reason he confuses with Ж or with Ы). So I made sure that he had extra practice building these letters out of beads and tracing them with pushpins on a cork board.

Fun Reading - this is just non-school related Russian books I read to M. This week we've picked up Буратино (Russian riff on the Pinnoccio story) and are continuing with Маленький подарок Антона. I decided that I need to put more emphasis on asking M to retell me the story in his own words. He listens a lot, but hardly ever talks about the story line or the characters. So far it's an uphill battle, but it's getting a bit better. Will stick with it since the results (conversation fluency) are almost instantaneous and he seems to pay more attention to the story.

Fine Motor

Along with M's occupational therapist we figured out that the best way to prepare M for some fine motor work is to give him something heavy to do, like a wheelbarrow race (he gets to walk on his hands while I hold his legs), pushing something heavy, trying a plank pose (with my help), or writing/drawing on vertical surfaces.

Right after that I gave him some quick fine motor tasks - lacing, mazes, pushing pins into cork board. It seemed to work well, so that's what I'm going to continue doing.

History

Yep, I decided to start history with him. I really don't like the traditional approach of starting with American history. So I was happy to finally get the Story of the World Part I book (thank you, Mouse Grows Mouse Learns and The Work of Childhood, for writing about your experience with SOTW).

We are moving very slowly with this curriculum. The first week we talked about what history is and what do historians and archaeologists do. We read a few books (note: SOTW recommended additional reading is sooo hard to get through the library - too few copies and too many requests) and watched The Magic School Bus Shows and Tells episode. At first M was not particularly excited, but MSB definitely helped change his attitude. Now he talks about learning more about archaeology and even going on a dig.

Funny aside: I mentioned to him that I always liked archaeology and wanted to be an archaeologist. Maybe I can still do it, said I. M's response: "No, you can't be an archaeologist! You have to have big muscles to do all the digging."

Science

I didn't know what to do for Science, but felt like we should do something 'cause M keeps asking to do experiments. Since I have a ton of Magic School Bus books and videos, I decided to do a MSB-based program, at least in September. Arbitrarily, I decided to start with rocks and minerals. I found a Crystal Mining kit and a Quartz Mining kit on sale a couple of weeks ago and M's been itching to open them ever since.

So this week we started with the Crystal Mining. Got all the crystals out and learned their names. Then went to the Natural History museum for an afternoon to explore their rock collection. Lucky for us, our Natural History museum has a wonderful discovery room where M could get hands-on with various rocks and see some volcanic rocks he hasn't seen before.

I'm already making some changes and additions to the next week's lessons. And I have to be a bit more prepared for Science - I have a problem remembering all the names of rocks and minerals and the related terminology in Russian.