TINDERBOX

In the usual way of things, each day of Five in a Row focuses on a different subject. Yesterday was Social Studies; today was supposed to be devoted to Language Arts. But of course learning doesn’t divide itself up neatly like that. We took an immediate detour, first thing, when Alex picked up Madeline and the Bad Hat, looked at the cover picture, and said conversationally, “The thing that I don’t understand is, these look like hieroglyphics.”

So off to Google we went, to find out why there would be hieroglyphics on a monument in Paris. We quickly found out that it was the Obelisk of Luxor, given to France by the viceroy of Egypt in 1829. We found a great set of pictures of the Place de la Concorde, the Obelisk, and the unbelievably garish fountain that stands alongside. A picture of the Place de la Concorde Metro station led us on a brief and completely fruitless excursion into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens, a subject which is just a trifle above the head of a four-year-old. (I should’ve limited my answer to “those are some famous words in French!” and left it at that.)

So then: Language Arts. Today when we read Madeline I encouraged Alex to find the pairs of words that rhyme. She had a bit more trouble with this than I expected; for example, she suggested that “cried” and “red” rhyme because they both end with the same letter. But she picked it up as we went along. Then we took four words, two picked by me and two picked by her, and generated a list of words that rhyme with each word. For example: line, mine, shine, Madeline, fine, sign.

The other Language Arts thing I’d picked out for her to do was copywork. This is pretty much what it sounds like: working on copying as a way of learning to write. I had her trace the word “Madeline” and then write it on a separate line. She has mostly learned capital letters, so I was interested to see what she would do with a word in mixed case. She copied it very carefully; the lower-case “a” looked a little funny, but the rest of the letters were great.

A little later on Alex wanted to read more books from the box. We read Adele and Simon and Madeline and the Bad Hat again (with, ugh, some discussion of what a guillotine is and how it works, because Pepito in Bad Hat builds a guillotine for chickens. I did not raise the question of past human uses, even if we are studying Paris.), then moved on to a book we’ve had from the library before, Belinda in Paris, part of a series about a ballerina with enormous feet. The course of the plot carries Belinda through a number of Paris scenes. Some of these are definitely starting to look familiar to both of us; we matched pictures in Belinda to scenes in Everybody Bonjours (a book we read yesterday) and used some of the endnotes from Everybody Bonjours to figure out that we were looking at the Tuilleries garden and at the Paris opera house. I learned something new myself: I’ve seen The Phantom of the Opera, but I had no idea that the Paris opera actually does have an underground lake in the cellar. I thought that was romantic fantasy.

“Someday can we go to Paris?” Alex wants to know.