ABOUT THIS WEEK:
I'm writing this at the end of October, so I am forgetting most of the regular day-to-day school activities we did (but they are pretty much the same week-to-week). I'll just quickly touch upon a few things. . .
This week the kids and I focused on bicycling together through the city here. We figured out the best cycling routes (wide sidewalks, bike paths, etc.) and we mastered our hand signals. Whenever we go biking together, we dream about biking through the French countryside together (something that Phil & I have dreamed about doing for years). What a great bonding activity that will be in a year or so with our young ladies!
We love making hearty stews and soups from scratch, from whatever we have on hand. This soup was made with potatoes and carrots mashed up with olive and sesame oils, feta, curry, and caramelized zucchini coins. I'm so happy that the kiddos are learning to cook from scratch.
It's so easy to feel like queens when we have delicious food and flowers in our home. In addition, we give one another massages and breakfast in bed sometimes. We are very, very good at pretending to be princesses.
This is an enlargement grid we made of a random picture, to show the girls how much easier it is to reproduce a picture accurately when you break it into many smaller squares. We did this in preparation for enlarging a letter-sized map of Western Europe onto a wall-sized map over four-feet wide. That sort of enlargement would have been a map-projection nightmare without our handy grid-enlargement system.
Using two rulers, the kids did a great job making a grid with 90-degree angle squares.
Check back next week for our final Western Europe map!
The kids watched me make this wedding gift for my cousin Hillary. I tried to come up with all different ways to embroider their names in cursive, but I was at a loss. Eventually I traced their names onto cardstock, backward, then sewed along the paper. It worked like a charm!
I'm happy that the kids were able to see me getting frustrated by a perceived obstacle, only to overcome it by brainstorming possible solutions. They see that I don't give up when things are challenging, and that there is always a solution for everything. Of course, embroidery is just a little problem, but when you challenge yourself to come up with solutions for small things, it just becomes second nature to "problem-solve" in any situation, big or small.
In fact, sometimes I'll walk into a room and I'll hear the kids say, "Hey, let's come up with solutions!" They're already in the habit, even without me there to encourage them.
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CURRENT INDEPENDENT READING:
Since we are still waiting for that darn shipment of books to come in, we are reading lots of Ranger Rick articles, and lots of articles in The Republican newspaper that Grandma Lynn cuts out and sends us.
EDUCATIONAL MOVIE:
The Life of Cleopatra: This documentary was fascinating. We were intrigued by the fact that she was raised in Greece, but came to rule Egypt. We loved that she bothered to learn the Egyptian language (when most rulers of Egypt did not). This reminded us of learning German, and how it is just common courtesy to learn the tongue of your host country.
We loved that she is fabled to have spoken at least 7 or 8 languages! Probably dramatized, but still. It is easy to imagine that she spoke 6 languages. Most Europeans today speak at least three languages, and Cleopatra was thought to be a genius.
We also loved her flair and drama. For instance, the way she would compare herself to ancient Egyptian goddesses (the goddess whose partner died, who had to raise her child alone, like Cleopatra). Very intriguing. And even though the pyramids were as ancient to her as she is to us today, she had scribes carve images of her in the old hieroglyphic style, as if she were a goddess. The fact that she spoke the Egypyian's language, both their speech and mythology, they loved her.
We also thought she was very brave to have killed herself, and to have done it so poetically when she knew that her death was imminent at her enemy's hands. How she is said to have had herself bitten by a snake, a snake that was believed to guard the entrance to the afterlife. And it is this snake that symbolizes the Egyptian goddess she liked to mimic. Very cool!
The kids and I love talking about this smart, headstrong woman.
