in pursuit of wild things

Over the weekend we had the brilliant notion to let he kids watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They have been re-enacting scenes from the film all week. After six days or so I’m not much of a fan anymore. Well, that’s not quite true…knights with silly boy humor is far more preferable than most shows for children their age. They have also pretended to be Native American friends of Father Marquette and Minn the turtle from H.C. Hollings’ Minn of the Mississippi.  We’ve spent the week studying the history and geography of the Mississippi River. I rather enjoy

watching them when their play mixes with their studies. Usually these things end when Littlest decides to pretend to be a Dalek and attacks everyone. Then one of them will run off and build a sonic screwdriver out of Lego’s and blow-up the Dalek. Or Oldest will just declare that the Doctor no longer needs his sonic screwdriver to blow-up Daleks since he has attack eyebrows now. None of that makes any sense unless you watch Doctor Who.

Other than the imaginative play of the children the week has been rather quiet. Littlest has insisted on having some school papers of his own to work on. He is now an expert at the shape puzzles one of his aunts got for him and asked for something “more mathy” to work with during the school day. At what point did he realize that working with shapes is mathematics?! This week he started joining us for read aloud time on his own. I’ve always just let him play near us during school hours but he is wanting to join in now. Instead of trying to drag someone off to go play with him he is asking me for math and writing lessons. He also likes to dance and sing. This week his favorite is Five Little Monkey’s.  Littlest is also still concerned about the sunflowers in the yard. He pointed to the flowers this week and said they were still sad searching for their seeds and wished they would look at the sun again. I showed him where the seeds were growing but he didn’t believe me because the sunflowers were “not smiling at the sun.”

Oldest is just about to wrap-up his studies of ancient Egypt. We have nearly completed The Golden Goblet by E.J. McGraw and are nearly finished with the book. Even though the middle two are not studying ancient history they have stuck around to listen to the story. In the next few weeks Oldest will be working on his first proper essay on ancient Egypt. He is a little nervous and really wants to do a good job. I told him he could take a week off from his writing lessons so long as he applied the techniques from his writing curriculum toward his history paper. I plan to help him with his first essay but I doubt he’ll need me all that much.

I will not be writing a wrap-up next week. We’ll be on break for a week and I might fit in a field trip. The following week Littlest will begin preschool and that will be a major change for us…we’ll have to follow an actual schedule…horrors!

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