Lessons

• Narration in French: episodes 6 – 10 from the Feuilleton d’Hermès (greek mythology)
• French reading consolidation: finished reading through Léo and Léa, she has a hard time reading cursive… Also read Le Fantome de la Bibliotheque.
• Writing: contined to work on French spelling sounds
• Recitation: began learning ‘le Lapin de Septembre’; to be completed next week
• Maths: intended substraction facts practice – but I stupidly drew a substraction table, Antonia grasped the pattern after the 6th entry, so it turned into a number pattern lesson, followed by a consolidation of negative numbers (small numbers – big numbers), then Mike pitched in to explain some property of substraction whereby the result of say 5 – 3 is the same as that of 3 – 5, but with the opposite sign.

The Unschooled Stuff

Language arts

• She dictated her first ever French story to me. This followed a lot of oral French storytelling and informal poems.

Reading

• We read several picture books in French together: Barbapapa, Le Fromage Magique,
• I read aloud a particularly good set of library books this week and also La sorcière du placard aux balais from Contes de la rue Broca
• We’re also into Claude Ponti again with our new book Le Chateau d’Anne Hiversaire
• Some independent reading

Maths/Logic

• Still playing with multiplication – she sure picked that up easily
• We printed out a map of the town centre and had Antonia lead the way from the car park to the ice cream shop

Science/Nature

• Examined the buds on the flower basket. We set up a stop motion video experiment to film a bud unfurling into a flower
• Made and installed a bird feeder – project from Youpi
• Went for a long walk down to the river – really lovely, antonia very exploratory, clambering and so on, especially in the south facing parts of the mountain. Made a collection of lichens as well as taking numerous photos.
• Picked out some other interesting nature activities from a library book
• Brainpops especially health, immune system, weather
• Forgotten from last week: examined the jewellery counter in a search for real diamonds, noted price, size and relative glitteriness. Also looked at real rubies, sapphires and emeralds.

4 mosses

History/Social Studies

• Noted the location of road name signs in the city

Practical Life/Cooking

• Helped make pancakes
• Made chocolate and pastry snails over at a friend’s house

Arts/Crafts

• Made herself a photo tour of the house, very sweet, it contains individual portraits of each of her toys, items of interest to her…
• Made several figurines and some jewellery with the sculpey clay her American relatives sent her.
• Made Mike a Valentine’s Day card
• Made drawings to illustrate the difference between raiding (stealing) and trading (exchanging)
• Made a drawing of a witch (green with hairy legs!)

Music

• She figured out the melody from the 2nd movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on the piano
• She did a lot of improvising and got a bit upset because she couldn’t really record her improvisations long term, so we’re on a search for a solution
• Watched The Magic Flute (again)

Sports/Activities

• Dance class
• Swimming class
• Ice skating

Games

• M and A have been playing the new pirate game he brought in the US. I gather he is looking for ways to make it harder, even though he has lost every time so far!
• Also Solitaire and Quoridor

Out and about

• Trip to the airport (again), to pick up Mike
• Two play afternoons this week and one sleepover
• One trip to the children’s playground and ice cream shop
• Shopping for Valentines Day flowers and chocolates and also for books

Special mention

• The adults have been testing out the new microscope – a hair and moss spore capsules. We decided to get the hang of it ourselves before letting Antonia loose on it.