Monday September 14, Day 6 Japan

Today was  a fun day!

Today had a little bit of a rough start but all in all a great day.  Nathan when he woke up was seeing his crazy eye thing again so he couldn't really see.  He also reports that he woke up in the middle of the night and was had the same thing going on.  He did not wake me up, he just stayed in bed.  This is the first time he has reported an event in the middle of the night waking him up.  So when he woke up this morning he was grumpy for the first 1-2 hours.  The typical behaviour we have been seeing at the same time as one of these events. 

First thing we did this morning was do some cleaning up of the house.  We all spent about 1 hour doing this.  We then had breakfast and started doing school work about 10:30. 

I decided to work on our Japan lapbooks.  We read the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes this summer.  Both Nathan and Genevieve loved this book, even though it was a little sad, although I was the only one crying as I was reading the book, I guess I was thinking what it would be like to loose a child to cancer.  The book definitely spured lots of conversations, about WWII, cancer, Japan, nuclear bombs, nuclear fission etc.  We had also started a popup banraku puppet theatre, and while we were making these the kids had watched a few videos of what a banraku theatre was, they both though maybe it was something you learn to appreciate.  Although both of them have suggested that it would be great to go to Japan and watch one.

                                                                  sadako on amazon

When we first started, Nathan was not to pleased, he was still dealing with whatever electrical issues were going on in his brain of his.  But as we started working he started getting back to normal.  He started to enjoy what he was doing.  Genevieve was thrilled to be doing this, and loved every minute of it.  We worked on our lapbooks until about 1:30 when we had to go to horse riding.  Nathan said he did not feel well enough to ride, as he had a headache and his ribs still hurt too much to be jostled around on a horse.  So Genevieve rode by herself.   She worked really hard for a solid hour on Ziggy.

When we got back home, Nathan helped a little more on his lapbook but not much.  Genevieve this is all she wanted to do, it is now 7 pm and she is downstairs with Nathan watching a movie, but she has her computer set up, with her cards and is searching for information about Japan to fill in more.  She was adamant when we started this morning that she wanted a really big folder to fill in.  She put in a lot of details on hers as well.  Her card on music was impressive and probably took about 1.5 hours.  She looked up popular Japanese music, then she searched on youtube so she could listen the music, and wrote descriptions of what she thought of the music.  Loved this!

Here are some pictures of their projects so far, I cant tell you how much I love love love this popup banraku theatre!  Its fantastic, and not too finicky!

 

Genevieves extra large lapbook, hard to see how big this really is.

We added a Japanese flag to the front of Nathan's, I did help Nathan with this.

I love how the theatre lays flat and pops out.  Seriously really cool project!

See look how cool the theatre is, hard to tell in this picture but the stage pops up too!

Nathan's I am not sure if Nathan will add anything more to his or not...






 

Update :  It is now 10:40 at night and Genevieve has just come into my room very excited to show me all she has been working on since I put her to bed at 8.  She had a bunch of books she could read on Japan, but no computer.  Wow I think she filled out about 20 cards to put on her folder. 

She was also extremely excited about doing these and asked if she could do more of them, she said she would not mind doing these in her spare time, not part of school, because she really liked doing it.  Then she asked if she could learn Japanese, and if it possible for us to travel to all the countries we will be studying.  She asked if it would be to expensive to go to Japan.  I told her to ask Jeff.  Funny enough there was a really good deal to go to Japan, and I had texted jeff saying lets go, and he said, why do you want to go to japan, what is there to see there.  Maybe Genevieve can show him her project and he can see there is lots to see in Japan.  I did tell Genevieve my plan was to do 1 country a month, she would asked if she could do more then this, and do it when she is finished her work before Nathan etc.  Not sure when she is planning on doing all of this, because she really doesn't have much spare time at all, but I loved her enthusiasm and how much she loved doing this lap book.