The excessively busy December

Never Ever Again. Such A Busy Month.

We had a violin recital, Christmas piano and violin recitals, a spelling bee, school concerts, and then the regular hassle of the holidays leading to Christmas.

 This is a toy that I had passed many times but it turned out to be quite good for the moment. I have been teaching the kids that one strategy for solving math problems is to reduce the complex problem to a simpler problem. Basically, this was a hands-on example for the same concept.

With my fourth grader we have been reading short stories and focusing on critical thinking. Doctor Seuss has produced some fine stories that I learned about through another blogger. We read the Sneetches and talked about capitalism, market arbitrage, innovation, consumerism, socialism; as well as racism, discrimination and inherent hatred.

We also read the Zax and discussed that it is silly to not make simple compromises and be left banging one's head on the wall. The risk is missing a lot of important events happening around.




With Yertle the Turtle we talked about revolutions, and dictatorships, fear and resistance, bravery and change. Very appropriate for our actuality.

The Lorax is of course telling the tale of global warming. It's wonderful.

This book we read to talk about your own expectations for yourself and the unnecessary pressure exerted by others' expectations for you. We talked about adults being bullies and children not noticing that they have been bullied. This girl has in fact been making the same grave mistake all along-she allowed herself to be bullied. Good wishing adults, under the disguise of admirers, were in fact bullies, paparazzi.  Perfection is the obvious topic but not what the core of this book is; sadly, many adults completely miss the point. We did not. Earlier in the month my daughter showed signs of struggle with her appearance and with her work in music. I found this book, "Stick up for yourself", to be suitable towards helping her cope; self-control and self-appreciation. In fact, our personal copy we gifted to a neighbor who was going through some rough personal times, and we read the library copy instead.



Scrabble was a new game for me but it turned interesting. We will play it to improve vocabulary, visual thinking and spelling.





We have two weeks at home for Christmas break and since it is super cold, we will most likely spend some of the time going to museums, and the rest with going to the library, and playing board games. We are de-stressing from the very heavily scheduled early December. Never again! We will learn to say NO to commitments.

Update: We played all imaginable board games-Ticket to Ride, Gobble-Gobble, Trouble, Carcasonne, Settlers of Catan, Clue, Uno, Skip-po, Rush-hour in parallel race, Old Maid, etc. We plyed with Snap Circuits.
We have been reading a little here and there. My focus has been native American history, and "A vovo vigarista". We will finish these in the new year. The children liked the following picture books about the forced indian boarding schools. Little kids can have a lot of empathy for the plight of other kids.



Update: Given that we were stranded by a horrible coldness, we spent most of our holiday time indoors which among many things also implied Movies. We watched Home Alone 1 and 2, Clue, Airplaines Trains and AutoMobiles, Crocodile Dundee, Finding Dory, Fish called Wanda, Deck the Halls, Trading Spaces, Christmas at the Kranks, Santa Clause 1, and the Back to the Future trilogy. Lots and lots of watching.