Learning Fun

We've been exploring all kinds of things recently. More time to explore than to write about it, though! Briefly, one of my favorite new-to-me finds is Google Books. If you enter a subject, it will show all books on that subject. After it does the search you can change the "showing" menu to "full view only." These are books whose copyrights have expired or are otherwise in the public domain. I've gotten the beginning Elson readers from the early 20th century, a really nice 1904 collection of bird stories by Audubon and others, and some Hebrew books (grammar, fiction, poetry) from the 1800s. Lots more to explore.

We've also enjoyed doing picture studies from the art series Come Look With Me. It has wonderful art selections that are interesting to study and discuss. Each picture has five or six questions that lead to discussions about technique, the subject, and your imagination about what else the painting might be telling us. It also includes a couple of paragraphs about the artist. We look at the same painting probably three different times during the week and talk about it for 5-10 minutes or so. It's really fun!!

I also can't rave enough about First Language Lessons. It's really been great for Amirah. And the Elson readers and Dick and Jane too. The language and daily life are much more similar to our own life here then some of the more contemporary books. So, we're really having a good time with learning. I feel like we've done a LOT in our more compact time of 30 minutes for kodesh basics (Hebrew, torah) and 30 minutes for chol basics (reading, writing, math). Other stuff we fit in as we can. It's really very good.

OH! And Amirah and company started learning to play recorder in our music class this week. They were very excited. We're having a good time. Three days until the "FOR SALE" sign goes up!