you don't realize how many steps each thing is in the beginning

what does it say about my own attitude towards chumash or teaching chumash if i dread bringing it up to chana every day? i do not want to engage in the--'battle' is a strong word, the negotiations that go along with it.

but maybe as per alfie's advice if i stop looking at it as something i, the one in power, is trying to get her, the one i'm trying to control, to do something... and actually view her as having a legitimate say in her own education, and me as a facilitator...

that's so crazy.

anyhoo, to break it up into manageable chunks, today's work was to read the pasuk (easy shmeezy) and to look up the 2 words she doesn't know.

a word about how we organize that. she got a new binder (very exciting), and looseleaf paper, and before we started, she labeled 22 pages aleph through taf. (or however many hebrew letters there are :-P). when she comes across a word she doesn't know, she writes the shoresh down under it's letter, then looks it up in the dictionary, then writes down the translation. this is many steps. finding the shoresh, finding the first letter, finding that letter amongst the aleph-beis (which may or may not involve singing the song, of which she has only a hazy recollection). then finding said letter in the dictionary, then finding the second letter in the dictionary and so forth, and then choosing the correct definition. (a little more complicated than you thought, right? isn't it great how far we've come?). and then writing it down.

so. 2 words are a little overwhelming.

chana said she wanted to find the words before reading the pasuk. i asked her how, then, would she possibly know which words she didn't know. she correctly pointed to the first and last words. astonished, i asked her how she knew that (her reading is not so good that she can sight read and pick out which words she knows and which ones she doesn't yet). she told me that i had pointed them out to her last night. boy am i sleep deprived. i have no memory of that. i congratulated her on her excellent memory, and she enjoyed my utter lack thereof.

we giggled a lot as she looked up the words. she tried to negotiate that i should just tell her what they mean, or she should do only 1 word today. as per alfie (i feel like i say that a lot. "as per alfie..") i said that i wanted her to have the skill of looking things up in case she was in a situation where there was nobody to tell her what it meant and she wanted to know. she said she would ask daddy. or elazar. i handed her the dictionary rather than respond. that kid can outargue me if i engage.