Preschool poetry

A few years ago, Joe and I started to think seriously about the possibility of homeschooling Marija. I wondered how it would work since I speak to her in Latvian, but the community language is English. So I looked up bilingual homeschooling and was surprised to find very little information online. (What was out there, by the way, was and still is at multilingualliving.com, a great site for people who have multiple languages in the family.)

Marija

Now Marija is almost four, and she will be home with me for awhile yet. So I've begun teaching her reading and other things, mostly in Latvian.

And since I've had two good and interesting educational ideas that work in any language, I figured I should share them with the world. This is the first idea.

Marija's book of poems

It similar to the book of poems I made when we learned about poetry in second grade. For Marija, I will paste in a poem or a Bible verse or a simple song or hymn, then have her help me illustrate. She gets excited when I tell her it's time for another poem... she loves crafts, poems and doing things with me, and every time we put together a new page, she gets all three together.

As you can see above, I try to keep things simple, but also to have Marija help. I cut out a heart, but then she cut out a flower we glued on top, for a hymn asking Jesus to make our hearts like white blossoms. Marija helped me pick out a photo of her to illustrate another verse about giving Jesus our childhood days. The birds picture is part of an old greeting card.

The composition book, decorated and labeled "Marija's Pantiņi" (Marija's poems), was my Christmas present to her. Marija had learned a few poems to recite at Christmas, which is a Latvian tradition, and it was obvious that she enjoyed it. The poems are also a great way to expose her to high-level Latvian... though I'm fluent in Latvian, my grammar and vocabulary are pretty basic.

In the evening before bed, I read the poem once and Marija repeats it line by line. After a day or a month or somewhere in between, Marija can recite it herself.

Her are some more poems. We like using paper scraps, but sometimes Marija will draw something simple using crayons or colored pencils instead.

A poem about birds nesting in trees and by the roadside

A poem about squirrels that leap into trees and eat pine cones

By the way, this is the time of year to buy composition books. They aren't $0.49 anymore once school is underway!

Memories

Some of you will have heard this story before, but I was reminded again by this post about helping strangers.

People say it is usually a bad idea to give cash to strangers, and I think that is often true. It is easy to be scammed and often better to point people to charities with screening procedures, or perhaps to hand out granola bars. (I'm planning to keep some in my car to offer to people with signs by the side of the road.) But I think there are exceptions...

Once, when I was still in college, a man caught up to me in a church parking lot in Silver Spring. He said he and his wife had just moved halfway across the country so he could take a new job, but their apartment wasn’t ready, unexpectedly. They didn't know a soul in the city and didn’t want to go to a homeless shelter (and, honestly, I wouldn't either…) and he asked if I could spare some money to help pay for a couple nights at a cheap hotel.

He showed me a copy of his lease and a printout of the hotel quote, and he said he could give me a check to pay me back as long as I promised not to cash it for a few weeks, until he got his first paycheck from his new job. His wife was waiting in the car.

It was the kind of thing that would have been pretty hard for me or anyone to verify, and I doubt any charity would give this man cash for a hotel room. I felt that this guy was probably telling the truth, though, so I went to an ATM and took out my last $80 or so. (My summer job would not start for a few weeks.) The man gave me a check to cover just about all of it and wrote his phone number on it.

When I called a few weeks later to see if I could cash the check, the number was dead. It was an out-of-town number, and if it had ever been in service, it had been discontinued after the move. So I cashed the check anyway, and it didn't bounce.

The prodigal

The warm weather has come with gusty winds throughout Maryland. Yesterday was blow-things-out-of-your-hands, stop-you-in-your-tracks windy. The day before was a little better.

Still, when Joe and I came home and saw that our recycling bin was missing, we weren't sure whether to blame the wind or a careless neighbor.

Yesterday, we came home in the evening to see the bin on our front stoop. Returned!

It will soon be labeled with our address. So will our trash can and its lid.

Coming home to something

In York,  I was so impressed by the old houses with Christmas candles in the window that I got some for own and put them up in my apartment. I was almost never home by dusk, though, so I put them on a timer.

It was so nice to open the apartment door and see a warm glow through the curtains. It made me feel like I was coming home to something, even when I lived by myself. I kept them up all year.

We have them here set up here in La Plata, too. 

They're especially nice on Mondays, when I get back from Bible study late, but while Joe's still out at his Monday evening activities.

Finally got around to it!

At long last! I made my own laundry detergent. Look!

Here is the recipe I used. The ingredients are washing soda, borax, water and a bar of soap. It is yellow because I used yellow-orange "gold soap" from CVS. I might use a different color next time... part of the process involves shaving the soap into a pot of warm water on the stove to melt it, and it looked just like egg drop soup.

Making it was more complicated than it should be because I ran out of room in my bucket. (See the milk jug full of stuff off to the side? There's some more in an old detergent container, too.) As a result, it took me about an hour. I will get a larger bucket or just make a 2/3rd batch next time, which should speed things up considerably.

Also, it is much thicker than I expected -- more a gel than a liquid. Fun and slimy, but I don't think it will pour very easily from my milk jug! Maybe when I get a larger bucket, I will get one with a lid for easy storage.

I am still astounded at the number of people who think taking on such a project makes me certifiably crazy. It's fun! It saves money! And anyone who doesn't want to do it can just go buy some detergent at the store! :~)

Didn't feel like writing at the time!

When Joe and I were unpacking my things, I declared that we were to save the small jar of applesauce and the animal crackers (even if Joe protested that he likes applesauce very much). I'd read somewhere that it's a good idea to have on hand the kinds of things you want when you are sick, because when you are sick, you cannot always get to the store.

A few weeks later (that is, about a month ago), Joe and I got terribly sick. We are pretty sure it was the stomach bug that was going through the area, and we spent a night seeing each other at something close to our worst. And the next afternoon, when we felt a little better, all we wanted to eat was animal crackers, applesauce and a bit of ramen we had in a cupboard. When Joe went back to work, he even took some little applesauce cups, given to us by a friend after we all had a picnic together.

Now I am building up our stash again, and this time Joe is giving me new ideas: ginger ale, ramen, vegetable and chicken soups, saltines along with the animal crackers, and applesauce cups as well as a jar to save.