Here's our homeschooling highlights from February.

Everyone likes to have me handy when they do their work, but they all have different noise needs. MsC likes music to help her concentrate. MsE needs it quiet. MsI seems okay with songs, as long everything doesn't get too loud. MsI is not quiet about telling you to "BE QUIET" when it's too much. Sometimes MsC wears headphones, but then we have to keep asking MsC not to not sing along, or snap along like she is doing in the picture above.

MsC needs some new headphones; she says they are squishing her ears. MsE wears her headphones with no sound or white noise, so it's quiet enough for her. It's difficult if she needs me to read out each sentence, when she's wearing the headphones and having to take them off and on every few minutes. MsC discovered that Zelda instrumental music often works for everyone.  

This month we were focused on Lunar New Year. The girls learned the symbols of this Spring Festival and found them in a scavenger hunt at the Flower Dome, finishing off their Bingo cards by finding even more symbol as we crossed town on our way home. We read lots of stories about this holiday and China, and noticed how local Singaporean's decorated and celebrated through out the 14 day festival. We learned our lunar animals, their traits, and names in Mandarin. We practiced a bit of Mandarin. We realized that "Can" and "Can Not", which is the response you typically hear to yes/no questions in Singapore, is because that's how it's translated from Mandarin. The girls did Lunar New Years lego sets. They visited China Town to spend some hóngbāo money. We got out and around Singapore a lot.

We checked out many of our Year of the Ox fortunes across Singapore. We found them everywhere from the malls, to different locations in Gardens by the Bay. The girls were quick to point out the differences between fortunes. The favorite was at the Flower Dome, because it told of our "Secret Friend" Animal. We ate traditional snacks at Tea time. We looked at the lanterns of River Hongbao for our final celebration.

Jonathan rediscovered the Value Tales books of his childhood, and so he is reading one to MsC and MsE each night now. They are biographies of famous people like Helen Keller, highlighting a different value for each book. I've heard the girls repeating a lot from the books. After their Value book, the girls go to bed for one-on-one reading. This month we've all been reading mostly Minecraft books.

MsE wrote her first unprompted sentence, complete with punctuation. MsC decided to write Jonathan a birthday story. She's promised it to him in installments. She's done it completely on her own. She started off with a Prologue in his birthday card, and is now editing away Chapter 1.

MsC loves the video game Minecraft. She picked out some Grade 1 / Grade 2 themed workbooks, which she is embracing: "Reading Success for Minecrafters" and "Math for Minecrafters: Adventures in Addition and Subtraction." I had to order them from the US. I can't find fun workbooks like this in Singapore.

MsE is happily reading and writing out the single words in the Minecraft workbook. She started off using the whiteboard for the writing part, but writes the words right in the workbook now.

I was surprised that MsE really liked identifying all the parts of a sentence in our activity. She identified capitals, nouns, verbs, adjectives, periods after being told their definition. I read the sentence out, but then she found the right element herself. Our Pinwheels reading curriculum really solidified vowel sounds for MsE, so she chooses the right short vowel when spelling or sounding out words. She's working on when to use Long vowel sounds now.

There's more to the math book than addition and subtraction. This month MsE has shown that she can tell time to the 1/2 hour on an analogue clock, work with place value to 100, skip count by 2's, 5's, 10's with the Minecraft Mathbook. MsE has her math facts memorized (above is simple math for her), but using a number code was a first for her. She loved the joke.

MsE is adding and subtracting 2 digit numbers. The girls played bakery with Singaporean coins this month and MsI's kitchen set. Actually they called "Paris' Patisserie." MsI helped the girls set out the play deserts, cups and plates. MsC and MsE both used yellow stickies to write the items and their prices. We had MsE do most of the adding and subtracting. MsC got the multiplication opportunities or correcting any mistakes in MsE's math. All of us used the coins.  I think MsI was responsible for baking and I don't know who did the washing up.

MsC is nearing the end of the first book of Beast Academy by Art of Problem Solving (2A). This book covers Place Value to 100s; Comparing Numbers, including using Number Lines; and Addition. Much of it was repeat for MsC, but the book is focused on problem solving. It was very focused on learning regrouping strategies and working with many sets of numbers at once. There were lots of word problems. The book is teaching her how to think about numbers abstractly, and not just use an algorithm to solve the problem. Early in the book she was frusterated that she knew the answer, but she needed to do the work in the way the book was instructing.  

It means that MsC has now gotten confident about writing out her work now. Until this book she was usually able to do all math in her head and couldn't see the value of writing it down. But these problems have a lot more pieces to juggle. She finds this Math Program challenging, but engaging. We'll be moving on to book 2B (Subtractions and Expressions) shortly.

We did some baking. MsE made Meringues from scratch and MsC baked Jam filled Bows for us.

We had a close up encounter with a Calotes Versicolor at the playground. Its a colour changing lizard, but isn't a chameleon. It had the weirdest walk. It was fast. It kept it's body quite high, and arms quite straight, while running with a little wobble from side to side to it.

The girls were learning how to play Net Ball at the time. Every time the lizard ran along the court, the game had to stop while all the neighbourhood girls screamed and ran away leaping on to benches and the playground equipment. He was only about a foot long and just an inch or 2 off the ground. He was really nothing to worry about. As we watched his colour slowly changed from quite a bold red-brown when he first appeared, to a tan/brown colour with a hint of green underneath by the time he ran away about 10 minutes later. His tail seemed to stay the same colour the whole time.

We finished off Ancient Egypt in our History Quest book, and will be studying about the Andes Mountains in March.