Puff the Magic Dragon

Today we read 'Puff the Magic Dragon'by Peter Yarrow and Lenny Lipton. I don't know why the name was familiar to me when I borrowed it from the library last week. Somehow, I had a feeling that it was a song and managed to find it on youtube.Funny how memories can be buried deep in you. Till now I don't know why I was attracted to the book. I found out that the words in the book are actually the lyrics of the song. We watched the video together and sang along...the folksong is poetic and I think sinks deeper than it sounds; of lost innocence and wander, life and death and disillusionment. I like the musicfactory version but the full length one is the one by Peter, Paul and Mary.

The kids stopped complaining about not going to the playground earlier....

Coming back, I read 'The Twelve Dancing Princesses' by Rachel Isadora, it had African characters (we did Africa last week)for Sofiyya but Umayr joined in. I used the decanomial beads to do skip counting of two to the song of "two Princesses went out to dance, out in a royal ballroom one day, they had such enormous fun so they ask another two princesses to come...four princesses went out to dance...twelve princesses went out to dance..."

I did quarter past the hour 3-part clockwork cards with Umayr today. Before doing so, I read 'What's the Time Little Wolf?' by Ian Whybrow and Tony Ross about a little wolf who had to find dinner with his younger brother who kept asking him the time that other animals thought it was a game and wanted to join in. They of course became dinner.

During dinner yesterday, Ihsan asked me what 'stalactite' and 'stalacmite' were; so Alhamdulillah for the iphone, I managed to google it and show him there and then. Today I found a site about cave formation for him and at the same time he learnt the chemical symbols for the chemicals formed during the reaction in creating a limestone cave.

I managed to finally do a performance review, after going through written work that can be discarded to base my thoughts on. I wanted to do it in December last year.It's a start. I finally have space to put Umayr's papers, next Ihsan and Sofiyya...