We hit our 100th day of school this week, and we did absolutely nothing to mark the occasion. But we had a pretty productive week anyway.

Math
This week’s math lessons continued to be laborious until this morning. Poppy’s worksheet today was all word problems, and instead of making her sit down, read and solve them, I read them to her while she did a puzzle. When she needed a visual, I drew it for her on a small dry-erase board, but for the most part she just answered the questions without prompting. It was such a relief to have a frustration-free math lesson.

Spanish
I didn’t think we had a microphone on the computer Poppy uses for Rosetta Stone Spanish, so we haven’t been using the pronunciation feature. But this week she discovered that there is indeed a microphone built in, and she’s been enthusiastically practicing with it ever since. She has to do her regular lesson before she gets to play with the microphone, though, so she’s been zipping through them quickly this week.

Physical education
Ballet class, as usual.

Recitation
Poppy worked for two weeks on Sara Coleridge’s “A Calendar” before she had it memorized. It was quite a bit longer than any other poem she’d done before. This week she did a much shorter one — “The Falling Star” by Sara Teasdale — and she had it down by Wednesday.

Reading
We seem to be going through a Frances Hodgson Burnett phase. We finished “A Little Princess” last week, and we started “The Secret Garden” on Monday. We’ve been reading a chapter a day at lunchtime, so Pete’s involved in our reading, too. I read this many, many times when I was young, but this is the first time I’ve read it out loud. And speaking with a Yorkshire accent? Not happening for me. So I’m having to “translate” all the Yorkshire on the fly. I’m sure that detracts from the book somewhat, but at least the kids can understand what I’m trying to say.

Geography
We studied Vermont this week, and Poppy was very excited to learn that two of her favorite things are made there: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and maple syrup.

Science
We hosted a meeting of a fledgling science co-op this week. I’ve been referring to it as “science club,” because “co-op” seems more formal than what we’re actually doing. There were three other little girls in attendance this week, and they played in Poppy’s room for about 20 minutes before we did our “experiment,” which was based on “The Magic School Bus in the Artic.” We read the book first, then I pulled out a bag of ice, a bowl of ice water, a “polar bear mitt” and a “walrus mitt.” The instructions for the activity are on the Scholastic website. It was very easy to pull together, but it ended too quickly for Poppy. She wanted “more experiments.” Duly noted, kiddo.