back from vacation

you know, it takes longer to write this than it does to do it.

so i've been trying to get to chumash all evening. finally things calmed down enough and i noticed that chana wasn't even in the house. she popped over to a friend. so i started cooking for shabbos, and eventually she mosied on back home at 8:40. i mixed up the kneidlach and put the water to boil, and that's when we sat down to chumash. how long does it take for a pot to boil? about 6 minutes? we finished before that.

so it has been a while, and i had no recollection of what we had left off with. i opened the chumash, and there was the post-it. so surely chana will not remember the new words from last time (vayechulu and tz'va'am). i am not so thrilled with the fact that i'm not reviewing, and therefore chana is not really picking up new vocabulary. but i am going to remind myself of why i made that decision: chana does not enjoy review. the goal i have chosen is to teach her to find the shoresh and use the dictionary, and to learn to translate. with those tools she will be independent should she choose to learn later in life. it is not necessary to torture her with review.
oh, yeah.

so i racked my brain for a review question that would be short and to the point, and at the same time review and lead into our current pasuk. so i said, "what happened to the sky and the land?" and she totally remembered that they were finished. nice :-)

now the challenge of how we were going to work this next bit. there was one new word in the half she was doing, and we had decided we were no longer going (OMG I FORGOT THE KNEIDLACH!!! excuse me while i go turn them off) (whew, they didn't burn) to read the pasuk on its own night, but rather read a phrase and then translate it.
so there were a few difficult elements. first, just to look up a word saps chana's energy. she usually can't do that AND translate. second, although she knew all the other words in the pasuk half, it is long enough that she wouldn't be able to piece it together. i knew she would lose the thread of what it is saying.
so we were trying to figure out how much to do and how to do it, and i said let's just start and see how it goes. i figured i'd read her cues and see when (hopefully before) it was getting too much.

so she read v'yechal elokim. she guessed the 3rd shoresh letter was "hey." (boy i wish i could figure out how to do hebrew font on this blog). she didn't remember what it meant, even when i pointed to the previous pasuk (vayechulu), but when i said gamar she got it. (also, she thought it was like "kol," to which i intelligently did NOT point out the connection coz that would bore her).
bayom hashvi'i she translated. she did not want to look up melacha and said she'll do it tomorrow. she remembered that the vav at the end (melachto) was he (or more correctly, him/his, but i'll take "he"). asher still needs a prompt from me ("th..."). and asa she translated correctly. all of this is way too much for her to put together. and she still doesn't know what melachto means. i said "v'hashem gamar bayom shevi'i" and she translated that. we'll see how tomorrow goes.

also, as per alfie (though i didn't get a chance to read his book this chag and i had thought i would), i told chana that i'm no longer giving her a reward chart for doing chumash since i didn't think it was particularly motivating her. naturally, taking away this chart felt like a punishment... (a pitfall of rewards that he discusses) so i upped her allowance. so now she has a way of accruing the money she would like for her weekly ice cream or soda or whatever small toy she is saving up for, and it's not related to doing chumash.