Random Thoughts for April 7

April 7, 2011

We are back (and have been for a week) from our AWESOME trip to Georgia. We had a great time, and I am still compiling my thoughts so I will blog about that soon. But as we continue on with our journey here in Hong Kong, (I can't believe that we are 10 months into this!) these are a few of my thoughts for this week.

I'm starting to think about curriculum for next school year. I can't believe that I am getting this into it, but I do enjoy it (for the time being). This is what I think we are going to do for the summer and next school year.
Summer:
Rosetta stone Mandarin - We were suppose to be doing this during the year, but honestly, it just falls to the way side.
Random books to read

School Year:

Hannah want to do some Greek, so I think I will encourage this.
Math - Saxon I just did a test and both Hannah and Gab (the math brain) will go onto 6th grade math. I do like the Evan Moor word problems, so I think that we will continue to work through these.
History - Still debating on whether they should do some US history or World History. I think that I'm leaning more to world.
Geography - Hopefully we will still be doing Mapping the world through art (Ellen McHenry) and I hope to add a little something else -- not Evan Moor
Spelling - Sticking with sequential spelling
LA - Saxon again
Writing - We will continue with IEW (Institutes of Excellence in Writing)
We will also be doing some kind of logic, brain like question book.

Whew ...

On another sticky .... these are some of the things that I've witnessed in the past couple of days.

• I sat in front of a guy on the Tram eating McD's fries. He at them out of the box ... no fingers touched the fries. Weird

• The girls saw someone "drinking" a Red Bull through a stirrer straw

• We got to watch a new driver drive up the "road". Actually she drove up on the sidewalk ... all the way up the road.

• We got video'd at the Racecourse the other day while we were practicing Rugby. Kind of weird, since it was the middle of the day on a work day.

• Tuesday was Qing Ming day. This is the day that families pay tribute to dead family members by cleaning their graves and putting some flowers and food there for them.

While we were on our way to see the Walled City in Kowloon, we noticed people lining up to at a doorway. (As a side note, we always want to see what these people line up for. These lines have ranged from only allowing 5 people in the Louis Vuitton store so people line up outside, to L'Occitane store because they were having a 35% off sale) This line was to get into ... the cemetery. We figured that we didn't have any long lost relatives buried there, so we figured we'd just keep walking.

• Because JC had off on Tuesday, I looked to see how many more days he has off this year. It looks like he has another 6 days off between now and 1 July. We get to celebrate both Western Holiday's (Good Friday and then the following Monday) AND Chinese Holiday's. Not to bad!

• Another cool thing on Monday ... we got to see this dragon go up our street. We were doing school work and heard the drums, cymbals and yelling. We have found that that usually means that a parade is coming ... and in most cases, a dragon comes with it!

Vegetarian - well kind of
We -- not really we, but I have decided to cut out beef, pork and chicken. Why? Who really knows. Does the family like it --- not really. In fact, I had a little revolt on my hands on Tuesday. After walking the streets in Kowloon Tong, and stopping at a Dim Sum place, the other 3 decided that they were done with this experiment and they wanted meat. So, I agreed that they could eat it when we go out to restuarants, but I was going to keep cooking the same way. So, at home vegetarians plus fish/shrimp ... out ... well ... I don't give a damn.