Here's our homeschooling highlights from late October.

MsC is taking another Performing Arts class through Evolve Arts. In September she moved up to the older kids classes for 8 to 12 year olds. She has a month left till she performs in the play "Annie." MsE is taking a break from classes; She says she doesn't want to do any classes until she doesn't have to wear a mask at them.

MsC is playing 3 roles in her play (an orphan - a combo of July and Kate, a maid - Cecile, and the villain - Rooster.) She has a total of 56 lines, sings a duet with her "best friend", and sings and dances in a number of group songs.

We tried using a song from the play as copy work for the first time to learn the lyrics. It was for the duet so MsC copied out her lines, I wrote out her partner's. Usually we just sing a song till it sticks, but doing it as copy work we were able to talk about what the song was about line by line. MsC and I did this at the coffee shop.

The drama class is smaller than usual due to COVID, but as the teacher says, this means they're actually getting one on one coaching. The drama school also changed locations, so that the rooms are larger. There's a good chance that the kids will get to do an in-person live performance now that Singapore is moving towards Phase 3 (the least amount of restrictions possible while COVID is a global risk). If that's not possible, they'll do a Live-Stream online for us parents.

The Little's did some first sound - letter matching activities. MsE did all the matches on her own below and then helped MsI when it was MsI's turn. This was too many letters for MsI to usually actually find the letter, but it was nice to see MsE do the activity twice. I think MsE is a bit past this; next we'll do last sound - letter matching.

We found some beads and spent some time making patterns. The big girls made friendship bracelets. MsI found the string too difficult so she threaded beads on spaghetti stuck in play dough. She like sorting them by type and colour. She was really mad when they got so heavy that they started to fall over.

I had to include this picture of MsE's lego rainbow. She was most particular about how she put it together and was so proud of how it matched the picture prompt.

Art lately has also included costume design for up coming Halloween. The girls especially liked trying out different makeup looks on each other. Not sure what this look is called, but using my gold eye shadow is one of their favorites.

We also made some Halloween decorations: construction paper black cats holding pumpkins and some flying bats. MsE wanted to measure her bats after. Her ruler was too short, so she had to do some addition to figure it out.

MsC visited the Art Science Museum with one of her friends and learnt about the impacts of plastic on wildlife. I haven't been to this museum yet, because it isn't in our museum membership and is pretty pricey. But, MsC said it would be fun to go again, so I will add this museum to our To Do List.

We're working our way through the Ancient India section of our History Quest book and also reading Indian Myths. Our favorite so far was a morality tale about the King who was so boastful, that the Gods taught him a lesson by sending Ganesh (the elephant headed Hindu god) to his banquet. At the banquet Ganesh's appetite could not be satisfied and he ate everything in sight right down to the gold plates.

I noticed an elephant attendee the next time the girls played picnic in the bedroom.  

We've been were working through the end of MsC's Canadian Grade 3 Math workbook, but her new (and first full) Math Curriculum has finally arrived.

I've hemmed and hawed about it for years, but finally went ahead with Beast Academy. It's for ages 8 to 13. MsC has always been a year ahead in Math, so I was planning to work on a Grade 4 (or Primary 3) Math, but Beast Academy is more about high level thinking and so it doesn't match up to the grades the same. It's generally considered for advanced students. After getting MsC to do the Assessments, I decided to starting right at the beginning with Level 2 which is marketed for ages 8 to 9. We might go through some of the sections pretty fast, but I wanted to make sure she didn't struggle and I'd rather fill in any gaps she has now than later.

We are all loving the beginning of this set. There is a comic book you read as the Guide for the lesson and then a Practice workbook. I'm sure MsC could read this herself, but I read the first lesson from the comic out to MsC and MsE and I was surprised to see MsE was just as interested in answering the questions as MsC. The comic posses a number of questions for the student to answer as they're reading along. I would think that this math is about 2 about years ahead of MsE, but she seemed to make all of the connections the book was leading them towards.

After the reading MsC did the workbook practice, but MsE couldn't be tempted. I'll keep reading the book with both girls for now. It was probably the longest I've gotten the girls to do math in one sitting without complaint. The comic book lessons are written in a very thought provoking way; and the layout of the workbook is very uncluttered which is something MsC needed.

I'm really wishing I had bought this program a year ago when I considered it.