Sam is working her way through the Kindergarten level of an American math curriculum called Right Start Math. Today’s lesson involved money. “You’ll need 5 pennies and 2 nickels.” Hmm. I apparently don’t have two American coins to rub together here in the UK, so we did the lesson with pence, which is much more …

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Sam: “Mom, I have a poem to tell you!” A Seagull’s Prey When pigeons fly home Seagulls will chase them And peck at their wings So the pigeons will drop down The seagulls will steal their home.

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New segment at the start of French class: we make a craft that we use later in songs or activities. These milk jug top ladybugs (ladybirds here in the UK) are pretty easy to make: all you need are milk jug tops, stickers or googly eyes, a permanent marker, and pipe cleaners for antennae. Like the lemurs of a few weeks …

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A dozen lemurs so far and the ranks keep swelling. Our “Country Club” took the month of June off, and then Sam selected Madagascar for July’s country, possibly because she wanted to watch the eponymous film (which we did). But Madagascar is seeping into August, thanks to this lemur craft we did last week. Take a toilet …

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Today I stashed a bunch of sentences around the flat, and wrote a one-word clue for each one. The game: Sam would pick a clue at random, then use it to find a sentence. Once she’d found and correctly read aloud the sentence, she would get the next clue. The clue for the sentence above was: Sink. When put in the correct …

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Sam handed me a story today. “It has a girl with a funny name!” she cried. From top to bottom, and then from bottom to top, it reads: Hi Sam I am Fib Hi Fib I say We love my Dad We show Fib around the house Bye bye Fib We say

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Sam is just starting to get reading. This morning I made her a couple of quick, homemade easy readers: nothing fancy– just what I could think of off the top of my head–that would fit on 4 pages. Things like: I am Sam. I love cats. Cats love rats. Rats run fast. She loved these. “Now I’m going to make YOU a little book, …

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Sam and I each got to make a mosaic at the Mosaic Mad Romans workshop held at our weekly playgroup in Hove today. The “mad” part of it seemed to be that we had less than an hour to complete the detailed work, but it was all quite fun. We learned that the Mesopotamians invented mosaics long before the Romans came …

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This month’s country is Iceland. Sam requested it after hearing so much about the Eyjafjallajokull volcano that erupted in April and continues to spew. (And no, I still can’t pronounce the name, despite our Icelanic studies.) Today we made our own volcano. It’s the only one in the British isles! Sam named it “The Queen …

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Out in Western PA, not far from where we used to live, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning. We didn’t need the groundhog to tell us that winter is going to be around for a while. The last few days have been cold. Not Midwestern-bite-your-face cold, but finger-to-toe-tingly-I-should-have-long-underwear-on …

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