chazara day whatever

you can look at the dates and figure it out yourself if you want.  we did half of revi'i on shabbos.  well, it was actually less than half but i told chana that whatever she doesn't do, she was finishing up the aliyah next time.  she agreed and finished it today.  today is presidents' day and i thought, wouldn't it be great if we finish the whole parsha today and then we can start the next parsha tomorrow?  chana did not seem enamored of this idea.  i said we'll take a lot of breaks.  she said my idea of a break is 5 minutes.  i said, ok, an hour.  she finished up revi'i just now.  there were quite a few words she didn't know.  i wasn't sitting next to her.  what i have been doing until now is not telling her the word, but telling her to continue translating and see if she remembers the word from context.  because it's 4:30pm and i've been trying to do chumash for hours with her and everyone is awake and needing me, i was not at my attentive best.  so i just told her the words.  i'll try to stay more on top of that for the rest of chazara. 

i don't know if we'll get to the whole parsha today.  chamishi is short but shishi is a doozy.  i also want to do math and reading and writing... we shall see.  maybe since today is a "day off" in the school system, i should focus just on chumash.

chana's computer is really going slowly and having trouble and she's doing 5+ hrs a day on movie making and i'd really like her to get a new one already.

oh, and while we were reviewing the pasuk of "and he didn't yasaf to know her anymore" she forgot what that meant.  and i said either it meant yehuda didn't stop knowing tamar or he didn't know her anymore after that.  ari was leaving the house and she called, "daddy!" but he left.  and i asked her what she wanted.  she said she wanted to ask him if he knew what it meant.  i said, what do you mean, i just told you what it means.  she said she wanted to ask him if he knew which one it was: did yehuda stop or did he stay with her?

so i said, quoting a rashi we've been doing, "chad amar v'chad amar!"

and she knew what i meant :-)

(it's the rashi that yosef went to do his work.  rav and shmuel.  chad amar his actual work, and chad amar to do his needs with potiphar's wife).

chazara vayeshev day 1

i got a couple of helpful ideas to do "fun" chazara.  one suggestion was to perform it (thanks sigal), and another suggestion was to play jeopardy (thanks, em!)

the first thing we did in the car was review all the rashis.  she had some trouble with our most recent long one, since she hasn't had enough practice in that.  the rest of them i told her not to translate; just read them in hebrew and see if she remembers the gist of them.  she did.  i like that because i prefer her to do chazara in hebrew anyway, to inculcate the lashon rashi.  the car ride was 20 min and she did them all, beautifully.

tonight we started performing the pesukim in rishon.  chana was pretty interested in the idea.  we did 2 pesukim.  one i acted as she read, and one she acted as i read.  then she said she'd rather just translate as usual.

it was good chazara because she didnt' remember the bundles and a few phrases she got after a little bit of thought.  i'm happy to report that she finally seems to have incorporated into her memory the shoresh "natzav" to stand.  (which we used to do by making a little standing up-side down V with my index and middle finger as legs.)

then we went through that long rashi.  i asked her what every single pronoun was because there were a lot of pronouns "she and they and him and them and they" and she was feeling like it was sooooo obvious but that really broke it down and i think she'll have an easier time with it tomorrow.  tomorrow i'm going to try for sheni and for those rashis w/o nekudos.  or maybe, since it's friday, we'll leave the rashis for the time after and we'll just do sheni and that rashi again and see how she does.

chazak vayeshev--how to construct chazara?

we finished vayeshev today.  chana didn't want to.  she wanted to go til maftir.  she's very busy figuring out how to do animation with her video editor and she didn't want to stop.  but for 4 not difficult pesukim, i pushed. 

now my question is what to do about chazara.  i could have her read the whole thing over again.  i might do that.  just take next week and run through it quickly.  but what will that achieve?  she will ask me the words she doesn't know.  she won't learn them from running through it one more time.  it might have some small value in her reviewing the story.  but it will annoy her, which will probably cancel out any benefit of reviewing the story. 

it goes back to educational goals.  if i know my goal, i will know what to do about chazara.  what is my goal?  to have her be able to read and translate the pesukim.  in reality, i've found that one more chazara will not teach her any new words.  i think she already has a sense of the flow of the story. 

we did 20 rashis on vayeshev.  those will definitely need a full chazara.  perhaps i'd be better off spending the week doing that. 

i wish i could think of a fun game to do for chazara.  again, i would need to define my goals so that i can construct a game that would be suited to them.

one of the really awesome things about homeschool is that i pick the goals, and then i can create activities that are precisely suited to what i want to achieve.  individualized instruction at its finest.

ideal vs reality

aharon is in for his nap and i'm not doing chumash.  the kids are all happily playing and i don't want to work right now.  plus we did chumash last night at 8:30pm and it feels like we just did it. 

i'm thinking about rashi yet again.  what exactly are my goals?  and are my lessons reflecting my goals?

i thought my goals were to understand all the words in rashi.  but as chana translates it for the 5th and 6th and 7th time and asks for the same words, my patience flies out the window and so too does my determination that she should learn all the words in rashi.  so my goal, such as it is, appears to be that she has a grasp of the general idea and the ability to translate most of the words.

i thought my goals were for her to read rashi fluently with no nekudos.  but this frustrates her tremendously so we are using the chumash with the nekudos and only reading it without nekudos once or twice afterwards and i'm not even makpid that she read it correctly if she can read it and generally translate.

i thought my goals were for her to understand the concept of rashi.  but many times the concepts are too deep for her and she doesn't really understand why he is saying what he is saying or what he is saying really means.  i let that go, and figure knowing generally what he says and mostly being able to read and translate is good enough.

i thought my goals were for her to enjoy rashi.  but it is often a struggle and i push her.

i thought my goals were for her to be able to read and translate rashi independently when she is older.  will she be able to?  i am not sure if what i am doing with her is the path to that.

when i was in high school, we did 50 mefarshim per test.  we would be asked, on any of these mefarshim, al mi neemar (to what is this referring) or mi amar el mi (who said to whom).  so we had to know those mefarshim cold.  after doing that for a year, my skills improved drastically.  sarah is not in the honors track.  she needs to know about 10 mefarshim per test inside.  are her skills improving?  i know they are not improving drastically.  

so i want chana to be able to read and translate independently.  i am not quite sure how to do that.  i thought the way to do it is to read and translate lots of rashis.  is it?  will it work?  will it work if she doesn't learn them perfectly?  if she learns them decently will she remember them?  if she doesn't remember them, will the skills stick anyway?  and let's not even get started on all those roshei teivos.

http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=4301845215340975827

so today i tried picking just 5 pesukim and reviewing them 3x. first i had to decide which pesukim. then we had to choose do 5 in a row, 3x? or each one 3x and then move on to the next? chana decided to do the latter. she said she'd remember it more easily if she had just done it, rather than having time in between.

she did 3 pesukim (not easy ones) about 3x each and she ran out of steam. she began complaining. at this point, if i were unschooling, i would stop. the guiding principle of unschooling would dictate that she is no longer interested, and it's time to be done. maybe that is how i'll do it with the boys. not true unschooling, but ask "who wants to learn" when i have a moment, and if i'm taken up on it, then stop when they feel they've had enough.

but i'm not unschooling chumash , and

one answer to the question that always comes up regarding homeschooling: "but how will they learn to persist and follow through and complete things they don't like"***

is that there are many situations where it's not torturous to push through and past their comfort zone and have them do a little more. and so it was with these last 2 pesukim. then we did new pesukim. 2 new ones, fairly complex. we still have rashi to do. chana asked how yehuda thought she was a zona because her face was covered. rashi addresses that.

*** i often hear that as "how will we train them to be obedient, locking themselves into doing things that make them miserable like the rest of the world?"

changing chazara method for a bit

revi'i is beginning to feel pretty long to both of us. even starting at pasuk 9, we are 15 pesukim (at pasuk 24) and they aren't quick. chana keeps asking the same words over and over. i wonder how many reviews it would take for her to do them. maybe doing as much of the aliya as we are up to isn't working. it's tedious, and she doesn't seem to be remembering the new words. perhaps doing only 4 or 5 pesukim a day, and doing them a few times until she is more fluent, might be better.

we only did one new pasuk and she probably would have been able to do more if her energy hadn't been used up on chazara where she already knows the story and found tedious.

then we took a break. rashi took 20 minutes with some complaints. a common back and forth between us is that it's too much to do, whereupon i say, "but it's been only 10 minutes."
i noticed today that instead of saying it's too much, she said that she knows it isn't so much but it feels like a lot.
despite her complaints, rashi went pretty smoothly.

i discussed the possible change in chazara method, and chana is reluctant. she agreed to try it tomorrow.

memorization

today was one of those days with a lot of whining, with me asking her to take deep breaths, with her insisting that deep breaths don't help. both boys were asleep and i wanted to get it in. chamishi is pretty challenging with a lot of new words and complicated structures and i start wondering if it's worthwhile to press her on these words.

btw, there are frequency word lists "100 most commonly used shorashim in tanach" etc which makes a lot of sense. apparently if you learn those, you can translate about 80% of tanach. which is cool. i think chana probably does have most of those words. especially as the frequent ones show up enough for her to learn them just by their repetition.

we still have rashi left to do. i asked chana if she wants to do rashi w/ nekudos today. she didn't answer me because i offered that when i wanted to do rashi before chazara and she was pushing for chazara. i gave in and also allowed her to choose which aliyah to chazer because she can use chazara in all of them. she chose revi'i.

in the framework of today, i've been pondering a post about unschooling that i saw this week. a lot of it is about having a certain confidence that kids are interested in knowledge and will learn. and sometimes i wonder what i'm in such a hurry to do this in elementary school for. i read once on lookjed (jewish education message board) that kids go through 12 yrs of school and don't know gemara, and they can easily master the basics of skills in 2 or 3 yrs post high school. so why torture them? for years??

not to mention that i'm not all that excited about sending my kids to high school, and if they don't have the skills because i'm unschooling them, maybe they'll just keep going as they are going. the 2 people i spoke to who were themselves unschooled said they were interested in judaic studies in high school.

and it would seem like the joy might be more if i wait. (i always wonder that after a day of arguing).

but this goes against the rishonim and mesora of chinuch. and that is a big reason i hesitate.

today was another day with no plans. i grabbed chana for rashi when aharon was napping, and she breezed through it and was surprised how short it was. perhaps tomorrow i'll have her do one more reading w/ nekudos and then move on to w/o.

then we were supposed to wait for jack to nap to do chumash, but til we (i) got to it, jack was awake. i wanted to finish shishi today, which we did. but she still needs a lot of the words. i have a feeling this is one of those sections of torah that will seem somewhat new to her when she does it when she's older. she is not quite grasping the subtleties of the brachos because she is wrestling with the translation.

when she read about yaakov not taking a wife from the daughters of k'naan, she started reviewing the story of k'naan being cursed. she remembered they took the blanket on the shoulder and walked backward to cover him. so although i'd bet she still doesn't know that "shechem" means shoulder, she remembers a lot of details from the story.

a little vort

today i warned chana well in advance that when jack goes down for his nap, it's chumash time. instead of doing the entire chamishi (which is very long), we just reviewed the last bunch of pesukim that she needs a bit more work on. then we did yesterday's 2 pesukim, which, not surprisingly, she didn't remember too much of. though she did remember some. yesterday, btw, she said, "his cursers will be cursed and his blessers will be blessed... hmm... i know that already. where do i know that from?" and i said, "avraham."

(and that just reminded me that everyone always says that eisav got the money and yaakov got the bracha of avraham at a different time. but it seems like at least this portion of avraham's bracha "blessers will be blessed and cursers will be cursed" was supposed to be for eisav (had he merited), ie whoever is running the govt.)

chana remembered the part about being the prince over his brother, because we discussed that yesterday. which just goes to show you that context aids memory.

so for rashi, today was the big transfer to the other chumash. w/o nekudos. well, chana balked. and tried to wiggle out of it. but since i didn't overload her on translation, she hadn't hit saturation point and she didn't collapse when i insisted.

and seeing the difference between the rashi w/o nekudos and the one in the chumash we usually use, i am reminded again why i prefer the more difficult rashi. first of all, it had "amar rabbi" as an abbreviation. which chana dislikes, but i like her to see so that she'll know it. and it had the ages as hebrew letters "kuf kaf gimel" instead of written out. and less punctuation. all of which irked chana, but i prefer her to learn on that.

but i think it's been a nice method to start on the easier one, with everything all spelled out, and then to transition to the more difficult layout, after she's already familiar with it.

so we finished vayera and started chaye sora. chazara has been reviewing the aliyos of vayera. today we did shlishi. she actually remembered most of shlishi. rishon and sheni were a little more disappointing. she remembers the story but not really a lot of the words and phrases that originally gave her trouble. it feels like she remembers about 50% of the tough words/phrases. it's a little disappointing. i was thinking about what my goal is for her. ideally, i'd like her to remember these things. but despite our chazara, a lot of them are not sticking in her head. otoh, a lot of them are...

the ants go marching 2 by 2 hurrah, hurrah

today went quite nicely. i still don't have an answer as to how to get chana to remember these vocabulary words long term. with sarah, i always just figured the ones that show up the most are the ones that get remembered, along with whatever quirks make the brain remember some words and not others.

but at any rate, chana has become quite amenable to me drilling her at random points during the day. plus it has the benefit of accessing more modalities. when we do it in the chumash, she recognizes it by sight, but not by sound. yet if she knows it by sound, when she reads it in the chumash she knows it. (kind of like comprehension of a foreign language is easier than speech, i guess in the mind things go one way but not the other. so if she knows it verbally, then she knows it visually, but if she knows it by seeing it she doesn't necessarily know it by hearing it).

we were pretty busy today, doing a science class and parkour (which is incredibly cool, if i can digress off of chumash for a minute) and then we went to pay a shiva call and then visited my fil after he had eye surgery yesterday. so not much time for chumash.

but chana did 7 pesukim today, with no new words, though she kept getting annoyed that only the majority of them were names and there was still some simple translation to be done. she zipped through her rashis, though she still doesn't pronounce them perfectly and still cannot translate certain random phrases. she does know the translation as a whole, which is a good step. and we are currently working on 3 rashis. which she can do in under 5 min when she's in a good mood.

then i futzed around a lot and forgot to do chazara, coz i don't like it and it's a little depressing sometimes. but chana asked me to please drill her on the words. and then eventually we did it and i picked a random pasuk from a while back and she remembered it after a closer look. and the pasuk that's been soooo slow she's gotten almost 100%. and so we continue to make progress.

she asked me when the tower of babel is coming up. pretty soon!

how to open the long term memory vault?

things went better today. we are being much more careful with each other. she only yelled once, and that was at the very end, when we were doing rashi, and i asked her to translate it by phrase instead of as a whole. she got furious, but i asked her if she knows the phrase. no she doesn't. which is why i asked her.

pasuk 23 is slaying us. she knows it all together, but cannot remember each word. so we keep practicing and practicing. and this bunch of words is not sticking. but happily, her idea of testing her outside the chumash is working. we are up to 5 words that i drill her randomly through the day.

and we are finally up to the names. the next 6 pesukim are just names. so that should give us some time to work on these vocabulary words.

sadly, i flipped open to a page today and i'm pretty sure she would not know what the words that caught my eye mean. even though we reviewed them plenty. how to get these words from short term memory into long term memory? i feel like i had an education class that may have discussed this...

definitely some things are becoming part of her skills and knowledge, like riding a bike. but a lot of these words are just like studying for a test, and then you forget it. all that time drilling and how much is retained? is this the best way to do this?

anyway, i am just relieved that we got over that little hump of misery and are back to our usual interactions.

this is one of the things i love about homeschool. sure, we can work on how we interact with each other if she were in school. but we have so much opportunity this way. and so many moments where i can shore up the loving to help provide background for the more difficult moments. and i really see how we are practicing our relationship. working on it. dealing with things that aren't working. trying new things. taking into account both our positions. what nicer backdrop to learn about relationships and how they work than our Torah? והגית בו יומם ולילה