Week in Review–May 12, 2013

In our lives… I had a great Mother’s Day – sleeping in until 9:30 am, receiving lots of homemade cards and drawings from my daughter and a very nice special breakfast prepared by daughter and her Papa. It’s good to know that she still thinks I am an awesome Mom, best in the world and her hero. I am not feeling particularly heroic at the moment, but rather burnt out with work, and I am really looking forward to our vacation next week!

Afterschool. Nothing too scheduled was happening at home. Anna’s Dad keeps giving her progressively more challenging problems, but she is able to solve them independently when she applies herself. I, however, happen to think that calculations are nice, but the real trick in math is ability to apply them, see patterns and reason through difficult problems where solution is not obvious at the first glance. Luckily, Internet gave me a chance to revisit my youth and find a set of selected problems from Russian math and physics magazine Kvant (obviously, it’s in Russian, but if you are interested, send me an email, and I’ll translate some for you). Most of them are way over Anna’s head, but I am giving some of the simpler ones to her anyway to stretch her mind and to show her what real “brainy math” looks like.

Places we are going. Most of the week was cold, but a heat wave returned for the weekend. We are looking forward to our community swimming pool opening for the season next weekend. In the meantime, Anna spent a lot of time playing in the sprinkles, helping us weed our veggie patch and learning from our neighbor how to climb trees.

Happiness picture of the week:

Week In Review–May 5, 2013

In our lives… We had a heat wave this week which meant popsicles and sprinkle play in the afternoons. I was still crazy busy at work, but hoping that things will stabilize a little in May. At least we planned out our summer and registered Anna for her summer camps. Now it’s on to booking the trip to New Jersey and our “vacation for adults” in August.

Afterschool. Alas, electronics is becoming more prevalent in our house with me being so busy with work. Anna still doesn’t watch any TV, but she loves to play on our iPad. Her two favorite games are Stack the States and Mathmateer. She continues to be very interested in math – this week I taught her how to do long division (dividing big numbers into a one-digit numbers for now). She is very proud with herself when she can complete a long division problem and read out the result.

Places we are going. Anna’s class had a field trip to San Jose Museum of Art, and I took a morning off to chaperone this trip. Kids had a lot of fun discussing several pieces of art from a visiting exposition of Chinese photigraphy and then did a guided art project inspired by Chinese traditional art. It was fun for me to get to see Anna interact with her classmates and get to know them a little better.

April in Review and May Goals

I was so busy at work in April that the whole month went by in a blink of an eye. We didn’t do nearly as much as we hoped we would, because my husband was busy at work as well. At least we managed to start our garden and enjoy the first warm month by spending some time outside. I still didn’t make any progress in learning to ride my bike – I will leave it to the summer when I am finally off my meds. My Hep C treatment is going well, but I am certainly looking forward to it being over and hoping I will never have to repeat it again.

May goals:

• 1. Stabilize work deliverables, so it’s not a “firedrill to a firedrill” like in April, onboard all new team members.
• 2. Have a vacation in San Diego without touching my email!
• 3. Book our summer vacation.
• 4. Refinance our house (or at least submit all the paperwork)
• 5. Get Anna to finish her first sewing project.
• 6. Bake together at least once.
• 7. Get and plant our birch tree!

Week in Review–April 28, 2013

In our lives… It’s been another crazy week at work both for me and for my husband where I was starting my work day at 6 am and ending it at 11 pm. However, Anna doesn’t seem to mind as long as her normal routine of having dinner together, reading before bed and cuddling before going to sleep is not disrupted. She is enjoying school, her Y afterschool program, her chess club and gymnastics.

Afterschool. Anna still spends a lot of her free time reading. She is now going through Famous Five series by Enid Blyton with some Boxcar Children mixed in for good measure. In the evening by Anna’s request we are reading Fractions and Decimals Made Easy and Anna is solving a lot of fraction word problems that I and her Dad throw at her. Here is an example, If you are third of your lunch, and a bird ate 1/6 of your lunch, how much lunch went into a wastebasket?

Places we are going. This Sunday we finally managed to go hiking again and drove to Big Basin. I was looking through my pictures, but it’s so hard to capture the size of redwood trees with a camera. Anna is loving hollow trees where she can play hide-and-seek. It’s an amazing place to visit, we are very blessed to have some of those redwood giants even growing in our neighborhood park.

Happiness picture of the week:

Six and a Half

Dear Anna! You are now half way through the seventh year of your life. I was watching you during a birthday party for your friend who turned 7 and it hit me suddenly how much you’ve grown lately. You are not even the smallest first grader in school any longer, and you can do so much more than you could in the fall. You are riding your bike with confidence, you could climb the rock wall almost to the very top today, you play chess, and you love writing. The rest is not new, but you continue to be easygoing and enthusiastic. Other children seem to like you, and you are starting to form closer friendships with several girls. Other adults often comment on your sense of humor and how you can make people laugh. You still love situational humor and sometimes reenact the same “funny” situations endlessly, but you also enjoy wordplay, riddles and jokes.

Even though I don’t have as much time for you lately, you still adore me with all your heart. You are writing me beautiful love notes and keep telling me that I am the best mother in the world. It melts my heart to hear you tell that. I am very blessed to be your mother, and I am enjoying this time in your childhood. Sometimes I wish I could freeze this moment to last for longer, but at the same time I am hoping that you will continue to grow and thrive in the second half of your 7th year.

Love, Mama.

Week In Review–April 14, 2013

In our lives. It was a spring break week in our school district. Anna spent it in Y camp where she had a lot of fun with arts, crafts, video games and a field trip to a skating rink (indoor, of course). I didn’t see her much during the week since I had a workshop at work with inevitable dinners and late night arrivals, but we spent some fun time together on the weekend.

Afterschool. We all love breaks for their more leisurely rhythm and later wake up times for papa and daughter. Anna spent some time playing math games created by papa on her MiniLuk, reading and sewing. She also bought a simple scrapbook in a Dollar Tree and is busy filling it with drawings, poems, doodles and ideas for science experiments. I love it when she has time and energy to be creative.

Places we are going. This weekend we went hiking to our favorite State Park (it also happens to be closest to where we live). The highlight of this park are huge limestone boulders, some with open caves – a perfect natural playground for kids of all ages. Anna also really enjoyed her second try at skating even though her knees are now blue and bruised from all the falls on ice.

Happiness Picture of the Week:

Math for Smarty Pants

Did you know that April is a Math Education month? Conveniently, we have a real self-led explosion of interest in math in the house. It was initiated by Papa who started putting these kinds of problems on the board in the kitchen (starting with smaller numbers). For some reason, they really appeal to Anna, and she gets a kick out of solving them and self-checking herself.

While it might look to me that school math curriculum is “marching in place” in comparison to Anna’s actual abilities, I give credit to her teacher who is focusing so much on “math strategies” and breakdown of “complex” (which means two-digit in the first grade) numbers into tens and ones. Anna is quite able to apply this knowledge to what interests her – multiplication and operations with large numbers.

We don’t really spend a lot of time explaining and practicing – both borrowing and carryover was grasped after 5 minute demonstration, but we do encourage Anna to do as much in her head as she can and only use pencil when it gets too hard. No calculators are allowed in the house – she is using an erasable electronic writing pad that we got as a gift and that comes quite handy for these mini-math lessons.

Even with this increased interest in math we were both surprised when Anna found Math for Smarty Pants book (targeted to 10+) and went on reading it pretty much from start to finish. She was especially interested in the section explaining how to calculate the day of the week for any date (I had to print out 21st century modification from here) and in math games like Bagels (except she cannot figure out why I keep beating her). It’s amazing to see my 6 year old taking off with math this way, and I can only hope to keep her interested for the next 12 years or so