Another Good Day

Today we did 3 hours of fairly intensive learning, since Tuesday was wiped out by Eli's fairly traumatic visit to the doctor requiring post-visit mama snuggles and rest and lots of Baskin Robbins ice cream (he got a very infected blister; the (student) doctor did TWO SHOTS of lidocaine and I really don't think he had a clue what he was doing; the needle bent and blood was spurting out everywhere; I think it would have been WAY less painful/traumatic if he had just puncture the blister and cleaned it out... OY). Wednesday was our two field trips. So.... we did double doses of everything today.

Hebrew was lots of fun. We had Zevi the wolf who teaches most of our class, and today he was joined by a new friend Tzemi the lamb (tzemer is wool in Hebrew). Tzemi was very afraid of Zevi at first but by the end of class they were very good friends and Tzemi made shabbat dinner for Zevi, but they did NOT have lamb. It was a vegetarian shabbat. Verb endings in Hebrew change for male and female speakers, so we needed to add a female teacher to our cast of characters, hence Tzemi. It was very cute. Tomorrow Zevi is going to tell Tzemi all about Rosh Hashanah.

We did lots of kriyah (reading), and several torah stories. This weeks parsha has many laws (mitzvot) in it. We focused mostly on returning lost objects and shooing a mother bird away from the nest before you take the eggs. We also learned some of the dinim and minchagim (laws and customs) for Rosh Hashanah. Pretty fun! Then we did 3 reading lessons in a row (we usually do one), and 1-1/2 handwriting lessons. We'll catch up in math tomorrow. Then we all went to a new-to-us water feature park in West Linn. Had a good time getting nice and wet.

Then tonight I went to a co-op meeting with some other homeschooling families. I'm pretty tired, so I won't go into it all now except to say that it was FANTASTIC and there was an African-American yiddishe mama there, and we were both so thrilled to meet each other. Her kids are teenagers, but it will still be lots of fun. The group of women there was incredible. Wonderful support to each other and I really connected with the group. It usually takes me 2 or 3 times of being part of a group I like before I really feel into it and connected, but this happened pretty much right away. They were just all really nice women. I think Amirah will enjoy it because nice women always have nice kids. :)

We'll be joining the co-op on Wednesdays. This will be our schedule:

10:45-11:30, 4H (cooking, needlecrafts, animals, plants, science, archery, really a rioutous amount of almost anything you'd like to work on; all of Amirah's favorite things)
11:30-12:15, physical education
1:00-2:30, historical math (check out Living Math; they'll be starting with lesson 13 - Fibonacci - and moving on to Da Vinci)
2:30-4:00, physics

Hopefully it won't be too much for her. I would have just signed her up for the afternoon classes, but we've been really wanting to join 4H and there's nothing wrong with some time to run around. Best part is, we'll only pay for what it costs to rent the building space. The science and math classes have teachers that will be paid, but the cost is a very reasonable $20 per month per class.

So... it's pretty exciting. We'll miss 3 of the October days due to Jewish holidays, so that's too bad, but after that we should have clear sailing, BE"H.

Uh oh. Better make that shabbat menu. Better be an easy one. This homeschoolin' mama is just a little busy lately!!! But what an absolute joy! :)