George and Martha

Did you know that the gentle, kindly hippos George and Martha from James Marshall's stories take their names from the Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I'm not sure how I feel about that. All I remember from that film is a braying Liz Taylor and a bawling Sandy Dennis. It's somewhat disturbing, but it's still close enought to the new year and all my resolutions that I think I'll look upon this as peaceful and non-threatening.

At any rate, she loves these stories. They are short and clever. Evidently, Marshall was influenced by French children's stories from the 1930s. I intend to ask my smart French major friend if she can track some of these down for me--in English, of course.

We had a wonderful start to our day. We played a few rousing rounds of Don't Spill the Beans!, then we used the beans to count to 100. She did fairly well. She still keeps dropping number 15. Curious. Then we sounded out some words with our lowercase letters from the WordLaunch game. She showed me how you could substitute letter b for letter r and make bug out of rug. By George and Martha, I think she's got it!

We're still working our way through Phonics Pathways. I should probably plan to finish PP before the summer months so that we will be ready for kindergarten stuff next fall. The pace feels laborious, but only because I'm the person who can't be bothered to read the instructions. Instructions are failsafes...

I've started poking around the state's education website in an attempt to find out the type of curricula our local schools are using for kindergarten. I've found some useful information that, so far, seems to dovetail with my own sketchy plans for next year. I'd like to incorporate more structured sessions for math and science. We'll continue to combine history and literature, but of course the main focus will be reading. My hope is that she will be a very strong reader by the time we start the Well-Trained Mind curriculum.