a laugh a minute

so chana's been in quite a silly mood these days, which is faaaabulous for chumash. and especially nice after being in a rather bearish mood the couple of weeks? days? it feels like weeks :-P before that.

so instead of reviewing pesukim, i've been spot reviewing the words she needs to review. we are both happy with that. it takes shorter, and i already know she knows the ones she knows, and i just want to practice the ones she doesn't. for pesukim where she's having real trouble with the flow, or with certain phrases, i have her review them as pesukim or phrases.

she's been cracking jokes and it's been very pleasant.

yesterday, i was miming 'asaf' by gathering with my arms and i accidentally collided with her forehead. she thought that was uproarious. and now our hint for asaf is me elbowing her in the forehead. good for lots of laughs.

we reviewed the word zera (and i can't help thinking, if we would have reviewed bereshis more she'd know zera and min etc, but no big deal--she'll learn it now). and i said seed and she remembered it was seed/babies and then thought it was very funny see babies. see babies??
so i made a hint miming "see" like making my hand a visor over my eyes and gazing off into the distance and then "babies" rocking my arms. and now when we see zera i'll mime see babies and that makes her laugh and she says seeD/babies.

today's new pasuk had 3 new words and it was long. but the white board got us through. also i told her what the new words' definitions were before she started, so when she saw the new word and asked what it was and i told her, she was familiar. after the pasuk i had her go over those 3 words again. the rest of the pasuk was simple enough that we can just chazer those 3 words tomorrow.

and joy of joys, the next 5 pesukim are easy! so i told her she has to do those 5 today and tomorrow. naturally, she chose to do all 5 tomorrow. i said that's not an option. she can do 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 today. guess how many she picked to do today? yup. 1.

so she pretty much breezed through that. though oddly she had trouble with vaya'as. come on. so i had her write down the shoresh. which she hates. but in her new and delightfully giggly mood she decided to do the shoresh with her left hand. sure, it took longer, but she enjoyed it (yay, alfie!) and is it longer than arguing with her?

then i begged and pleaded for her to at least look at the next pasuk, just the first half, coz it's so easy. which she did. and then said, "darn, i'm translating it to myself." so she did it. when she had trouble with the last word "shana" i suddenly remembered we forgot to do rashi. and she laughingly said darn, she was hoping i'd forget and she wasn't going to remind me. but i remembered. so soon we'll go through that rashi again.

we're not making fabulous progress on rashi. but it's the summer.