building rashi skills

so i'm getting a little stalled out on rashi. the ones we are doing now are not so exciting, and chana does not seem to be remembering the nekudos or the word-by-word translations no matter how many times we do it. (though i seem to remember that it often feels this way, and then poof! it clicks one day. or it doesn't and she doesn't learn that vocab). yesterday the word "re'ei'hu" came up and she had no recollection. do i want to hock her by reviewing the tower of bavel story again? maybe yes because she doesn't remember it. maybe no because review will just annoy her and will it actually integrate the vocab? she probably remembers a solid 50% of the new words.. and the rest just didn't sink in. but i digress. back to rashi. yesterday we finally got to it at about 8:30pm. i decided to do a rather large rashi from bereshis, to see if she remembered it. she remembered the translation outside, and got quite animated as she recalled it. and she was able to read correctly and translate about half.

so i'm feeling a little lost as to what my goals are for rashi. i would like her to be able to read and translate rashi. but how to achieve that goal? i thought it would be by selecting a rashi, showing her how to read it and helping her translate, and then reviewing it until she learned it. do enough of those and the patterns will begin emerging. either there is more to it, or i'm not picking good rashis, or who knows what. maybe i'm doing it right and it just needs more time. she's only in 4th grade, and the goal is to have a decent ability by the end of 8th grade. so i guess we just keep plugging away.

when chana is finished eating we'll head back into bris ben habisarim. then chana's spending a week w/ her grandparents, so no chumash.

sarah is making noises about being home next year. she wants to be unschooled in chumash. and i want to kick up her skills a notch. she saw how large chana's rashi was yesterday, and commented that i let her get away with not doing very much. (yes, she was as resistant as chana often proves to be ;) plus i was wary about pressuring the oldest child too much). so it will be interesting, if she does choose to be home, to see if we can ramp up her rashi/ramban skills. her translation skills are pretty decent. i'd like them to be excellent, but we'll see.