playground work

it's been a long day, so i'm not even sure how much i remember. let's see what i can reconstruct. we were heading out to the beginning of no-school picnic, and i wanted to do chumash first. i think i've written before what a terrible idea it is when i try to get us dressed, make food, and do any type of academics when i'm trying to leave by a certain time. add into the mix that elazar got a phone call for a playdate in the playground this morning, and we're batting .000. anyhoo, i told the playdate "sure" and threw together some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some apples and carrots (chana won't eat pb&j btw) and ran out to the park.

it actually was a nice idea to do work in the playground. i started out doing chazara from the beginning of noach. she forgot the first couple of pesukim, and i began to despair, but happily it was premature. (not that despair is really appropriate anyway). she got into a groove and did remember a significant amount of the pesukim. which is delightful. we couldn't chazer all of them because it was too much, so after a bunch we went to our usual chazara.
every time she needed a break, she would pop onto her scooter and do a few rounds. or climb up the monkey bars a bit. or swing a little. then she'd come back ready to do another pasuk. it was really really nice.

then, this evening, we finished up chazara (just the last 2 pesukim). the new pasuk was complicated. as much as she translated it, she had a really hard time decoding it. i don't blame her. even reading rashi, i wasn't 100% sure what the pshat was. ("spill blood the person in a person his blood will be spilled...") the gist was that murder is not allowed and as per rashi, the murderer gets the death penalty.
the second half of the pasuk is that this is because hashem created Man b'tzelem elokim. so chana couldn't even comprehend what that meant. hashem has no form. that got her started thinking about what was before creation.
i wanted to convey to her that the pasuk was saying that murder is not allowed because Man is b'tzelem elokim. it was complicated getting her to comprehend that. i asked what if a person kills a dog. she said no, killing Man is worse. why? because he gave birth to all people. no, i said, not adam harishon. all people.
i said tzelem elokim is the ability to think. i was wondering if she'd say that animals think, too, and then we would have discussed the difference. but i think just grasping the basic idea of the pasuk was too much.

we did another pasuk, too, which was easy. yay. and tomorrow's are easy.

rashi she is still having trouble with the pronunciation of the one we are in the middle of. but i think she's getting better. hopefully by the end of the week. and we are still in the middle of the big one.
if she had already known the pronunciation of the one we are in the middle of, i may have started a new one that elucidated the pshat of some of these tricky pesukim we are doing now. but she didn't, so we didn't.