training up a child, part 2

during all my uncertainty last week about schooling (or not schooling), my wise friend laurie made a fantastic suggestion:  why not pick a few things that you want to do with the girls each week, and assign them each a day?  that way, i'd still be free to do them when and how i wanted, while having the reassurance that i'm accomplishing what i hope to with them.

introducing, our new 'calendar' =)

the four colored cards represent four types of activities:  music, nature/science, chinese, and reading/writing.  they're magnetic, so we can move them around from week to week.  if you know chloe, you can imagine she's excited about this new nifty set of cards ;-)

this week, our music consisted of dusting off mommy's violin and daddy's viola, giving the girls a chance to compare the members of the string family (since we have 3 out of 4!), identifying the various parts, and letting chloe put bow to string (which she was surprisingly good at).   no pictures, unfortunately, since mommy's hands were both occupied in keeping the aforementioned instruments intact ;-)

nature/science was covered by the apple picking previously documented.

for chinese, i found some printable flashcards, which i used to work on a few phrases.  letting chloe glue the paper on to index cards, punch holes, and thread them on a binder ring definitely piqued her curiosity.   another handy set ;-)

i try to point out the characters as we go along, but i don't necessarily expect her to recognize them just yet.  they're more for me to remember what we've done.  (video below)

for reading and writing, we started a handful of sight words: index cards with 'table', 'chair', 'oven', 'floor', etc. printed on them and placed on their respective objects. 

chloe was doing fairly well redistributing them when we mixed them up, and i considered the lesson over.  i started in on some much-needed ironing, and when i checked in on her, what was she doing?

lest you should think we forgot our little lu lu, she was happily doing her 'reading' too:

i'm sure that as the weeks go on, it will get harder to think of creative ideas for our lessons, but for now, i feel pretty good about our system.  yay for friends with good advice! =)