February First

FUNNY MONTH: We started the day out by making a calendar for the new month. We talked about things that make February special, including its brevity, Valentine's Day, President's Day, Groundhog Day and, of course, that whole leap year thing.

While CeeJ and Bee filled in days, dates and marked standing appointments (yoga, music, ballet, Tae Kwon Do) I played our calendar day standards: "Calendar Cat" and "Chicken Soup With Rice." I added Josh Groban's "February Song" to the mix for good measure.

PUSHING PAPERS: We hit the workbooks this morning, but instead of going to the half dozen K/1st grade ones we have, I used a (supposedly) grade 2 reading workbook for CJ and a "Moving from 1st to 2nd Grade" book for Bee. We're definitely done with the straight up K/1 stuff - it's just busy work for them and life's too short to fill it with busy work!

STEP BY STEP: The kids took a break from bookwork and we shifted our attention to housework. Specifically, putting new carpet on the spiral staircase treads. At first blush one might think, "That doesn't sound like good schoolin'," but I'd argue that it is. For instance, last week CJ & Annabelle had helped me measure the stairs and pick out new carpet (we had to find a remnant that was big enough), so there was some math goin' on there. And I think it's good for them to see the steps of the home improvement process, and have a hand in it when they can (even if they don't pursue careers in construction, it sure is good to know how to do things yourself).

Today while we were installing the carpet, Annabelle was very eager to have a hand in it. While cutting the carpet and stapling it to the treads was out of her league for safety reasons, she was a perfect candidate for the most fun part of the job - putting the "new" treads in place.

ACROSS THE POND: For some math and science fun, I thought we'd pop over to the BBC's amazing Web site. I pointed my browser to their KS2 Bitesize: Maths homepage. We played a game featured prominently on the page: "Questionaut."

Its graphics were stunning - kind of Edward Gorey-Tim Burton-MC Escher lite.

I figured that "KS2" would mean the activities were geared for K-2 grade students. And maybe they are. But if they are, well, the British wee ones are learning a whole lot more than primary aged students here. ...

The questions involved everything from prepositions to dividing decimals. And then there were some language difficulties (yes, we and they both speak English, but they call their quotation marks "inverted commas").

That said, there were a lot of questions the kids were able to figure out on their own (especially the science ones). But answering the questions wasn't the only challenge in this game. There were eight worlds, and at the start of each world, you had to figure out how to make the character(s) inhabiting it give you the questions, and it wasn't always obvious or easy how to do so.

Overall, it took us a little over an hour to win the game. We'll definitely visit the site again.

DONNING THE DOBOK: Today marked the start of CJ (and Christian's) second month of Tae Kwon Do classes. Last Friday, we scored a CJ-sized uniform (called a dobok in Korean) that was just $6 at Value Village. (They're $25 to $40 or so new.) Tonight was the first time he got to wear it. I forgot to ask Christian if the dobok improved CJ's abilities. ;)

Now all he needs is a black belt to go with it! : )