the house is literally littered with cheerios

(and that's the spare remote/aharon's teething object).  so maybe pre-pesach is not the time to do chumash.  maybe when chana is hungry and 3 boys have spent the last half hour crying, in unison and one after another, is not the best time.  chazara has not been going so well.

though perhaps that is not accurate.  since we rushed through the parshiyos, chana is frustrated at chazara.  she doesn't remember a lot of it.  there are so many words she doesn't remember.  the story line is not clear in her mind (which would help her remember).

i had this great brainstorm that i would read it expressively to her, and she would stop me if she didn't know a word.  but there were so many words that she didn't know, she didn't understand too many words, she didn't have any idea what i was saying.  i think this is definitely due to the fact that too many times when we sat down to review, there was a lot going on or it wasn't an ideal time for her emotionally.  if we had sat down while she was "in the zone" and we had tons of time and no distractions, i don't think she would find it so frustrating.  (this might be a good argument against homeschooling, especially for a kid with ADHD in a family with siblings.) (except for the other good academic arguments for homeschooling* ;)
chana keeps moaning that i'm not listening to her, and i keep saying, "if you wait until the exact moment that i lauch jack onto the couch because he's climbing on top of aharon's high chair and smacking the bejeebers out of him, odds are i'm not paying attention."  (and yes, i launched him multiple times and often that's exactly when chana would resume translating.)

so she's getting hungrier and more frustrated, and so i just read and translated the pesukim to her.  i paused at certain words and asked her, and she always knew them.  because she knows them in context AND when she's not wrestling with the grammar of the words she already knows but not perfectly.  so once i took over, we finished chamishi in just a couple of minutes. 

i wonder if she remembers the other parts of chumash that we reviewed and reviewed and reviewed any better, though.  a lot of chumash is a process and she slowly builds vocab and skills into her long term knowledge.  so some sticks and some doesn't.

today we still have some chazara for vayigash and also rashi.  we are making progress on the rashis, as long as we take our time.

yeah, that's the dustbuster that ran out of juice.
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* to specify a few: individualized instruction, ability to go at her own pace, lots of time to pursue interests and passions.