TINDERBOX

We’re going to have five consecutive days (Wednesday-Sunday) at home with no nursery school after coming home from our post-Christmas trip to Memphis. Michael has to work on Wednesday and Thursday, but after that it will be all of us together.

It seemed like it might be a good idea to use that five-day stretch for a practice run with our intended homeschooling curriculum; after all, they do call it “Five in a Row,” and days are what they mean. Alex has been eager to dive into the box that I call “kindergarten books,” and Michael and I figure that (a) we could use some practice, and (b) it would be nice to be sure that this is the approach we want.

We’ve decided to start with Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline, a book we all know well and one of the FIAR books that’s most suitable for a four-year-old. On the menu for our practice week: learning about Paris and France, exploring rhyming words, figuring out other ways the girls could line up besides the canonical two straight lines of six (i.e., an introduction to the factors of twelve), comparing the illustrations of Paris landmarks in the book to photos of the real thing, learning about the appendix and why we have one (because Madeline has an appendectomy in the book), and discovering what happens when a person has surgery. We might have dinner at a French bistro in our neighborhood, and maybe we’ll search out a good local source for French pastries. (It’s amazing, what I’m willing to suffer for the sake of my child’s education!)

On top of the Five in a Row studies, we’ll probably continue on with the daily or near-daily reading practice we’ve been doing, and add a small amount of daily math. Alex has been interested in fractions lately, so we might pull out some of that – or maybe we’ll just stick to adding and subtracting, which is where she left off in the Miquon curriculum when the initial thrill of having a math book wore off.

I think it’s reasonable to aim for a total of about 60-90 minutes a day of “official kindergarten.” Maybe a little less for the practice week; maybe a little more because we haven’t got a feel for what we’re doing yet.