We fly out of Mexico tomorrow. I’m reading this page, and it sure is a lot of words, even though I felt pangs from time to time for not keeping it updated enough. It’s been almost four months! In that time, I led the music theory, music history, and half of the art classes for both boys, and Aryeh— who’s been my charge for math, English, science (for half of it; C did earth sciences with the boys until Mérida) and violin— has done… ok let’s do this by subject.
Math: multiples and factors, including lots of times-tables drilling; 3-digit addition and subtraction; area and perimeter; area model for multiplication; all sorts of stuff with fractions; and yesterday, as a bonus activity since we finished the Khan Academy fractions unit, we did a class on Roman Numerals, which he really enjoyed. This was the subject I feared the most heading out, so seeing this list is making me pretty damn proud!
English: he’s read a book of short stories by I.B. Singer, a giant manga about a cat we got in Mexico City (both of those books have been sent home already so I forget their titles), The Railway Children by E. Nesbit, and Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime,” (the YA version), which he’s doing his 4th grade “Bottle Buddy” project on. Griffin was in 4th grade when vivid started, and was obsessed with Trevor Noah, so we got the book on the iPad and on Audible. So it’s funny to revisit now, a different situation where non-paper books are very helpful! Aryeh struggles with spelling and writing, and I’m a grammar nerd who represented her school in the Hudson County Spelling Bee in 7th grade, so that’s been fun for us 🤯😵💫 I picked up a couple of paper workbooks and have been poring over every nook and cranny of education.com for materials. His writing is amazing, and it’s so cool to get to see these little daily activities the teacher would see but not necessarily share with the parents. I read to the boys almost every night from Huck Finn. We’re almost done!
We only did Life Science in Mérida and it was about Mexican biomes and animals, which he really enjoyed, and the water, carbon and nitrogen cycles, which he did not.
For violin: when we got here, Aryeh had performed Minuet 1, from Suzuki, earlier in the summer, and barely practiced since then, totally stalling out on Minuet 2. His teacher, and my friend, Emily, had suggested taking a sideways path around and then back to Minuet 2, so on my iPad, I made a whole folder of music for him. Useful pages from the Essential Elements books the kids use in school orchestra, the first half of the Fairfield Fiddle Book, the first pages of Don Krishnaswami’s 2 octave scales & arpeggios (his book’s for sale on another page here! 😇), and a Samuel Applebaum book of first etudes (Beautiful Sound for Technique Building or something like that). Aryeh did all four fiddle songs- including Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a song I sang at Farm&Wilderness, so I always get teary when he plays it!! Plus he now plays a scale and arpeggio whenever he takes his violin out of the case!! And just the other day, we got to the end of Minuet 2. Finally!! I grew up a Suzuki kid, and I love the tunes so, so much. But it’s hard without the community element of a group class, all the other kids inspiring you, getting to hear the later songs played by kids, not by the perfect example on Spotify. I’m hoping we can make it to a Suzuki camp this summer.
One note about teaching my kid violin: last summer at Point Counterpoint, I asked my friend Tina Lee Hadari, whose two daughters are absolutely lovely, motivated and talented musicians, and who both started with her (the younger still studies with her, I believe), how she kept the difference between practice and lesson clear, since when Aryeh started, he took with me, and I was terrible at that. Tina said, “Oh, we don’t do lessons! I just practice with her every day!” That was life-changing.
Note: the boys also did Spanish, units on Mexican History, feminism (a great online course on intersectionality taught by Bettina Aptheker), and Mayan Studies with Christopher. I’m not writing about what Griffin has done because he worked with C during those periods when I was with Yeh. But Griffin is such a voracious, insightful reader, it’s been cool to see what he does when he’s limited to the books we brought for him and ourselves. I’m sure I’ll leave books out, but on this trip he’s read: The Autobiography of Malcolm X, two Murakami novels, Dubliners, the History of Mexico, and he’s deep in Don Quixote now. AND he asks to read my Joan Didion essays when he’s bored at night!
