Of Schedules and modules and all that produce

We had a great schoolday today, well at least compared to my uninspired day yesterday. Maybe we, or I, was just tired from half a day under the hot sun. I'd just use my thalassaemic condition as an excuse...: )

I got Ihsan back on his work plan and we managed to cover a lot of stuff. So, if Ihsan is not doing anything it's my fault, LOL. Sofiyya was on a roll early in the morning, doing her usual 'reading', pincer work and colours.

Before we started school, Umayr was already building a brown stair tower and continued working on them even after our shared reading. I tried to teach him sight words- ' I , You and He'. Simple things, I thought, but he got stuck with 'he'. Of course they were simple, to ME.

I should have stopped but the simpleness of it disturbed me and I presented twice. He, of course, got more confused. Umayr must have felt my frustration cause he came into the room, where I was trying to not get angry, with his chalk writing on the slate. When I came out, he was working with the slate and the sandpaper letters.

I did not push him anymore the whole day, as I should. He joined Ihsan and me for 'Story About Writing' and ' Noun: Key Experience'. He liked the latter and wanted to find nouns around the house too. He then asked for outdoors and the boys played soccer.

In between cooking, we did written work. Umayr insisted that he would not do any today. Ihsan wanted to do something else instead of what was in his work plan. I finally managed to sit down with Umayr as the chicken was cooking. We did shapes and middle vowels.

Umayr was confused at first, kept talking about the first consonant. He managed to identify most of the mid vowels though, there was some confusion with 'a' and 'e' which was good enough for me.

After zuhr, we had tilawati and I read ' More Quran stories for Kids' which was part of Ihsan's work for the day. He went on to read the translation of the verses related to the story and did his research work of the day on it.

I wish English had signs like the fatha, dhomma and kasrah of Arabic, maybe then Umayr can read like he can Arabic. I'm being 'simplistic' again....

After some free time, the kids started singing Raihan's Ashabul Kahfi and asked whether they can listen to it on my laptop. While they were listening, I thought I'd set up the tent and let them pretend it's a cave.

It was a blast. When I told Ihsan to imagine that it's like how the Ashabul Kahfi had to go through he answered, ' But there was seven of them! There's only three of us here.' Oh, was there? I checked and seven is one of the opinions. He must have got it from the nasyid which stated seven. Wallahua'lam

The boys had a very interesting conversation today. There were asking each other if each knew what a word meant. It was funny cause Umayr was asking Ihsan if he knew some Malay words and Ihsan asked him about colours in Mandarin.

Later, at night, Umayr asked me in a joking way, where is the land with the most curry? I knew he wanted Curryland but Ihsan answered India but he was quick to point out that of course not everything is made of curry cause then the cars can't move on the road and the buildings would collapse.

He then asked me a very interesting question; ' Ummi, why is there so much curry in India?' I told him it's because they have a lot of spices. 'Does that mean they grow a lot of spice plants?' So tomorrow, or sometime this week, we are going to learn about spices and the plants of India.