some of his drawings

art school

Isaiah and Marian got to attend art school during their summer vacation from AM Chinese preschool.  What a blessing these sweet young girls were to teach our kids and inspire them so!

The first morning we were about 5 minutes late and I joked, "we'll have to tell the teachers it was because traffic was so bad during our commute."  The problem is:  the art school door is straight across the hall from us-  about 6 steps from our front door.  Truly, the perfect set up for this busy house of kiddos!

The first day Wang Laoshi had Isaiah and Marian draw a little something, just to guage where they were at.  They looked at a fake pear in front of them and tried to draw it.  Immediately she notice, "oh, so she's got lots of imagination and he's more of a realist."  Yep.  She nailed it.

She missed the other aspect about our boy, that perhaps since he's a realist, he likes to correct most everything that, in his view, is skewed a bit.  The other day he was sitting at the table and asked Matt and I, who were standing in the kitchen, "do you know how much water you're supposed to drink every day?"  Matt answered, "a lot."  And Isaiah corrected his dad:  "No, more than that."

theme days for the heat

I had very high hopes to teach the kids straight through the book of Matthew during these hot days at home....  but we lost track of it pretty early.  Argh.  We lost track-  ahem, I did- of basically all my glorious plans for homeschooling....  and after a short storm of "How could I do this!?" I decided to just let it go.  We'll get there.... and there is a time for summer vacation.  Like, Summer.

But we still did enjoy a few theme days where we read every book on our shelf and tried to find some interesting You Tube videos for just a few fun themes:  space (shuttles, planets, stars) and our bodies and ah.... maybe Curious George was our other theme day.  (PBS has a fun site for CG games online for free.)

But in better news, while we've been working for a while on sounding out words, we just started in with giving writing a stab and I think we're all loving it.  I'm seeing that this way into reading might grab them a little bit more.  So far, they're quite enjoying spelling words aloud and writing them sometimes on their own too....  these reading days are pretty exciting.... and oh, Jesus, please give me patience for this sweet journey with these kids I adore!

instead of a filing cabinet...

I've surprised myself to discover that I really enjoy blogging.  And now as we begin a journey as an officially homeschooling family (I just finished clicks to order some great books!) I'm going to give this a shot as method of record-keeping and open-houseing for our homeschooling adventure.

At this point I'm ridiculously naieve and totally starry-eyed, visionary excited for what lies ahead for me with our kids: learning, growing, exploring, discovering together.  Oh may this somehow, by the grace of God, turn out to be a wonder-filled road that we travel together...  for your glory Lord!