Put Me In The Zoo

We LOVE the Dr. Suess books, even the ones written by others. The girls eat them up and by now I have them memorized (mom and dad, I'm sooo sorry if I made you read the same books over and over again... I now know your pain). I let Ophelia pick and easy book today so she just finished reading "Put me in the Zoo" and then she and I took turns reading "Junie B., First Grader" and later this evening we'll read "The Little Princess" together with Lavinia and Helena. Ophelia is reading- a lot. She must have two hundred vocabulary words for the first 9 weeks and some of them seem really hard. Words like: attribute, characteristic, communicating, congruent, consequence, contribution, geologist, government, hypothesis, inferring, inventiveness, location, manipulatives, mutual respect, particle, participate, predicting, representation, rhombus, scientific process, solution, tradition, venn diagram and a host of others. Maybe she does actually know what her air quotes mean... Hey, anyone know why she has "individualism" as a vocab word in Social Studies in first grade? I've decided that first grade is hard and I'm glad I don't have to do it over again but having a child in first grade makes me feel rather... lacking. I'm afraid that by the time she's in 5th grade I'm going to have no idea what she's talking about. I actually had to check a few deffinitions from her vocab. list to be sure I didn't tell her the wrong thing. It's just crazy. She's doing great though and loving it. Today she was on "superstar" level- the highest behavior rateing in a school day. She's flying through her piano book too and is very dilligent in practicing both piano and tae kwon do. Our house can feel like a zoo sometimes.

Helena and Lavinia are doing school at home with Jeremy and I around my work schedule. Lavinia is learning her letters and their sounds, patterns and shapes and how to write her name. We're talking about families and working together and basic money concepts (you can't get something at the store without money- that would be stealing.) Helena is busy exploring the world around her and "reads" often. She has adopted yet another baby that requires her constant attention and she is a loving mother indeed. Life is very busy there are times when I really do think our house just may be a zoo!

Visit our other website for a discussion about the role/place of children and parents within the church http://www.onourfaceworship.blogspot.com/.