A New Coat for Anna

After a Christmas wedding, a car accident, and some medical crisis, we're back to some more academic type schooling this week. Mane is working through lesson 16 of MUS, and she's nearly halfway through the 2nd grade Hooked on Phonics. She's been painting most days with a daily watercolor calendar we bought at Barnes and Noble after Christmas. The calendar features famous watercolors and some helpful tips for trying your own similar painting.

Today we read A New Coat for Anna by Harriet Ziefert. We'll be rowing this book for the next few weeks. It's about a little girl who needs a new coat after World War II. Her family has no money. So, her mother barters for wool, then for the spinning, then for the weaving, and, finally, for the tailor to make the coat. It takes a year for Anna to get a new coat, but, in the end, she has a new coat and several new friends. Today Mane drew a picture in her school notebook to begin our pages on A New Coat for Anna.

Today we also continued our studies of early and ancient China. We read about the Great Wall of China in You Wouldn't Want to Work on the Great Wall of China! by Jacqueline Morley, and we looked at pictures of the terracotta army in The Emporer's Silent Army by Jane O'Conner. We talked about how being so terribly afraid of everything is what made the emporer Qin so cruel and ruthless and how we don't need to live our own lives in fear. Both books mentions some of the advantages of having an organized empire (standardized weights & measures, standardized money, better roads, better protection from invaders). We talked about how those things are good, but they would be better if the emporer had cared more about the people who were doing all the work to make those things happen. We did some comparing to the early rulers of Mesopotamia, as opposed to Hammurabi.

Plans I just need to write down for next week before I forget:
- Demonstrate how non-standardized measurements are a problem
- Talk more about acting out of fear vs. acting out of care and concern for people
- Learn more about weaving - maybe make our own weaving loom
- learn about making dyes (Anna's mother dyes the wool red with lingonberries in the book)