Springtime and blossom all around

Ballet girl took part in the Music Connection's second solo contest. She performed Sonatina in G Major by Beethoven and received a perfect score and a wonderful review. All students whose performances were excellent were invited to a Honors Recital. This was a very happy occasion.

Sunlight boy should have performed as well. His performance of French Childrens' song was judged only one point shy of perfect. He has become a very good audience member and has been cheering for his sister most of his life, so we do not have any dramas.

Both kids are advancing very well and are way on their way of making good music. Sunlight boy is half way through piano Suzuki book 1. Ballet girl is one song from completing piano Suzuki book 2, and she is making astounding strides in violin Suzuki book 1. All teachers are raving about the kids' efforts and results. I am too. Music education is a wonderful opportunity to learn discipline, to learn that good effort equals good results, to learn to be critical, and to learn to deal with hard moments. Music is a wonderful way to make good friends and to avoid going down the wrong path.

The highlight for our spring is music. May will offer two opportunities for performance (IMA competition and Annual Bulgarian Piano Festival), and June will offer two more (Guild and End-of-year recitals). Then we will settle in the calmness of summer.

We will be spending the summer in the midwest. Portuguese family camp and Portuguese Youth camp for the young lady in Bemidji, MN. My folks will spend a week in Bemidji with the young man as well.

Some other updates:

1. English:
• Ballet Girl is an avid reader. She devours books of any kind. When she listens she listens with understanding and offers a lot of questions and logical commentary. She is a few lessons shy of completing AAS 3. I think we will finish AAS3 during the first weeks of school in August. I am focusing on review of what we have practiced to date. She is also very interested in writing original stories. I happened to come across a Usborne, write-your-own adventure story book while visiting Seattle. This book has served us well, and have offered us the basis to discuss the structure of short stories and also books. Quite informally at this moment but sufficient to set the stage for future discussions.
• Sunlight Boy is reading well as well. We were reading the Bob Books and reached the fourth set when I decided that it is better to switch him to AAR1. I am glad I did. The level is quite simple and offers us the opportunity to practice the essential building blocks of reading. I am seeing the young man starting to read in his head. I am hoping that this level will bring him to reading with understanding and expression, and will help him to decode better. So, we are going simple for the rest of teh school year and the summer. I think that in first grade, we will go with AAR2. I bought it for Ballet girl because I was overwhelmed when I realized that I may have to teacher her to read, but she did not need it; she was a few levels ahead of AAR2 when she began first grade. However, with my slower reader we will take full advantage of AAR2. The boy is also beginning to spell phonetically. We may or may not start AAS1 next year. Depends. AAS1 worked for my daughter but the child has to be ready. He needs to  be a strong reader first, and then we will work on the spelling.
2. Art:
• Ballet Girl loves art. She draws, she builds sculptures, she loves chalk now that the weather is on her side. She expresses herself very confidently with art. 
• Sunlight Boy loves art too. It is the new great activity he discovered in Kindergarten this year. He has been coloring, drawing, cutting, molding. He made himself a sword by drawing it on paper, cutting it and taping it to a stick from a game. He also made a terracotta warrior from cardboard boxes, and has been punching this thing for days. I have always said that boxes make the best toys! His imagination is wild. He gets inspiration from movies, books, conversations. Earlier in the month he asked me to make a copy on the printer of one of his favorite characters. I did. He cut the image and used some cottom balls which he taped in the back of the image, and then taped another piece of paper behind that. This was a stuffed super hero toy! This child is amazing. 
3. Math:
• Ballet Girl is advancing really well. She is a few problems shy of completing Beast Academy 3C. The plan is to move through Beast Academy 3D before the end of the summer. The only thing she needs to work on is not panicking when facing a problem she has not seen before. Once she puts her thinking cap she can tackle the problems very easily. 
• Sunlight Boy is also making great advances. I am holding him a little back at the moment. He is very close to doing 2dx2d multiplication. We are currently covering fractions. Over the summer I am planning on covering with him challenging first grade challenging problems; formal addition, subtraction and multiplication strategies; and mental math tricks. 
4. Portuguese

1. Ballet Girl has been interested in speaking for a while. She has no problems remembering conjugations of verbs. The grammar she gets easily. She is also reading quite well. I will continue to read through our textbook with her, continue covering grammer and will download all Carrossel episodes she wants on her Kindle. 
2. Sunlight Boy is also doing well in portuguese. He is not readily interested, but he understands a fair amount and reluctantly repeats. He is close to finishing one textbook and I will move him to the next level.
5. Sports: There is no time for sports. I am relying on plenty of free time in the park and in the garden. I will try to enroll them in soccer in the summer for a full week, and hopefully, there will be an option to enroll them for weekday-only games in the late summer/early fall. During June the kids will be in a full-day summer camp near the house. In July they will be away to MN for a week. Hopefully, during the first week of August they can play soccer again. The rest of the time will be pool time:).
6. Cultural Activities
• We have been attending a lot of events. Locally we like the Illinois Philharmonic. 
• We recently went to a Bulgarian Folk Festival. We did not expect to sit through the entire three hour event, but we loved it and we sat through it.
• We also watched The Producers, a very funny musical, quite relevant to the political campaign that is happening in the US.
• We also saw a few movies this month. We watched Zootopia which we loved. It was very clever and the first movie Ballet Girl was able to make connections between references and the real world:). She, I and a friend also watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, which was funny and light-hearted, nothing spectacular, but definitely not crude. How could we miss the jungle book?! Yes, we saw it the first week it came out. I loved it. It was mostly true to the book, and the visual effects were wonderful. I still need to sit and talk to the kids about the meaning of the story. Maybe one day we will rent it from the library, watch it and discuss it. I recommend the Jungle book and Zootopia.

This month our read-aloud time has focused on Lunch Money, Tools of Ancient Greece and Simple Machines. We are also going to read about the Librarian who measured the Earth and Archimedes.

I love Tools of Ancient Greece. It is a book I will have my kids refer to later on when they themselves get to explore the ancient world. I view our current exploration as a very nice sneak preview, but probably the real learning will happen in a few more years. Simple Machine is wonderful because it really well explains a lot of physical concepts which again will become more approachable at later grades, but this is a fabulous foundation. 

Lunch Money is a book I adore. First because it offered a wonderful illustration of principles of story telling that were discussed in the Usborn's write-your-own story book, and also because it is a very thoughtful read. We talked a lot about money, how money are made, how money is being used, what money really means. We talked about competition, price, value, charity, and many other concepts. As with all learninig, I have learned that unless a topic is encountered many times and discussed from many viewpoints, the topic is not really learned and understood. Hence I again see this book as one of the many books we have used to think about money.