Satori Smiles

And this concludes our Madeline FIAR readings! It was great to save the video for last, as it tied together all the books we read, as well as ones we didn’t read. Satori now is familiar with France, Paris, the Eiffel tower and perhaps some Paris landmarks. Yesterday morning she shrieked that the Little Einsteins were in Paris! Then they were at the Eiffel tower! She was sooo proud she knew of this place. She also is getting to know parts of her body – stomach, liver, large/small intestines, heart, and of course appendix.

The below photo shows most of the work we did for Madeline study, including our lapbook (many flaps not shown, I’ll have to get this on video soon), all our books, some artwork and her new doll. Not shown are things like our picture disk on our laminated map (she can point out France on any map or globe now), our research on our Anatomy CD, and the artwork on symmetry.

Now Satori is working hard at writing a book. She is reading it to me now, it is about a little girl who lives in India. (She’s been obsessed with this concept, and I’m not sure where she got it from or even that she knew India was a place, lol!) Just this past week she has been “pretending writing” books.

We have quite a few of this scribblings now, how cute! Can’t wait until she can really write, I look forward to all her stories. She has such an imagination!

One of my favorite songs by They Might Be Giants, “Make a Little Birdhouse in your Soul”, makes me smile. Did you know they also have great CDs for kids? (We only have their No! CD, but I should get the others sometime… Also Cake makes cool kid’s music.

Anyway, Satori had been begging me for a little birdhouse to paint, and today she finally got her wish.

She took her painting very seriously and said that birds from all around are going to know where Satori’s house is, as her house has the prettiest birdhouse all around!

In writing this post, I learned that you use quotation marks in song titles, songs, poems, and short stories, but you italicize or underline longer works like books, films, full-length plays and longer musical compositions. Apologies if I didn’t do this properly before.

In concluding our Five in a Row Madeline book study, we are watching the Madeline DVD (1998) which covers all the books we’ve read, Satori is absolutely enthralled. Our last day is Science, and there isn’t much scientific lessons to be learned. We covered health, and went over how to wash our hands, how to stay healthy with exercise, and what appendicitis is (Madeline’s affliction in the book). We did remember to ask the doctor to show us where her appendix is at Satori’s wellness checkup last week.

Daddy enjoyed himself last weekend helping Satori do her Science day for Ping, so he wants in! Every weekend, he will be the “teacher” in one of Satori’s FIAR days. And mama will be the assistant teacher, cutting/pasting/preparing in the background.

Our Math lessons in Madeline were symmetry, smallest to largest, and groups of 3, 4, and 6.

After brief demonstrations in symmetry, Satori and David made an artwork by putting paint on one side of a paper (the other side was covered up with contact paper temporarily), and then folding it together to create a symmetrical design!

And the end result! Totally unintentional, but David and I saw the same thing right away… Guess what we saw? Satori? She said she saw the bottom of the ocean. If you click on the picture and look closely, you can see the ripples of the seaweeds.

Next we went over groups of 3, 4, and 6, using our counting tigers. (In Madeline, the little girl says “Pooh pooh!” to the tiger at the zoo.) We asked her to count how many lines the tigers made and Satori proceeded to count the tiger’s black lines (stripes) on their back, lol.

After our lesson, Satori was so enamored with her new counting wild animals (tigers, zebras, pandas, etc…) that she is still playing with them.

Thank you David, Satori’s second teacher, for helping us with Madeline’s Math day! Satori and David also drew a tiger, and you will see him once I figure out how to add video to this blog. First, have to charge my pocket camera that does video, all I use these days are super-huge DSLR cameras.

We were honored to start the day at our friend’s house for a music playgroup!

At night, we studied the art of Madeline. We already went over Paris architecture earlier in the week, so tonight Satori constructed the Eiffel Tower with little wooden sticks and cotton balls for clouds upon sticky paper…

And concluded the night by learning how messy charcoal is! In the book Madeline, there are many monochromatic pages with only black upon the yellow background.

I had never heard of Madeline before this month, but quickly found out she’s a well-known gal! Even my husband knows of her. So today we started Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, with our Social Studies day.

Kicked off of course by reading the book, then learning about France, Paris, Eiffel Tower and other famous Paris Landmarks, as drawn in the book. Located France in Europe on the globes, maps and Google Earth. Colored the 3 stripes of France’s flag – blue, white, and red.

Got a stamp in our passport.

And to say goodbye to Ping, our very first FIAR book we rowed, we finished up our Math day. Ping had alot of relatives!