And so the Christmas parties begin!

We really do not understand this. We homeschool so our child is supposed to be an unsocialized misfit who doesn't get to join anything, much more party. And to be very frank, we parents, both mom and dad, are such introverts that we sometimes find these gatherings almost physically painful to experience. And yet, we party. And party. And party! In fact, we already missed two big parties last November, and that wasn't even Christmas season yet!

Today, we had two simultaneously: the condo party and Papa's office party. Mama planted herself in bed and absolutely refused budge (too much socialization for me already!), so Papa somehow managed to be in two places at the same time and dance a Michael Jackson number wearing an afro wig, too. The photo of the resulting spectacle is too horrific to post here, so here's Nitoy's instead:

Wow, Nitoy has more than just a passing resemblance to cousin Ieko!

And here's one from the rooftop party:

Papa was busy munching lechon and empanadas somewhere in the background.

We have another party on Saturday with our homeschool support group, another on Sunday with the parents' high school friends and their kids; another on the 11th with the PMA's Maagap class; hopefully another one next weekend, a small swim date, with Mama's best friend from elementary school and her kids; and still another with the extended family in Nueva Ecija the last weekend before Christmas day. Whew, we really hope to get some lessons done in between!

Our Calvert Primer: attendance record

Screenshot from Nitoy's My Calvert portal.

The past four years that we'd homeschooled, we always fully intended, at the beginning of the school year, to religiously keep records of our school attendance. At the start of every school year, I printed calendars to color in or check, but somehow, after a couple of weeks boredom or disinterest would set in and the log would be abandoned.

So imagine my joy when I opened the My Calvert portal to see an attendance log that automatically recorded every single day that Nitoy did his assignments online. No more manual inputting and counting of days! Our only complaint is that the online record doesn't allow for time zone differences. Server time in Maryland, USA means that we here in GMT+8 appear as if we do lessons on Sundays. We don't!

In any case, minus all those Sundays, we now have logged 44 days doing 28 lessons. That means 1.7 days per lesson, all the other extra non-Calvert subjects included. That's rather...slow. We have to keep reminding ourselves that our seven-year old is doing tons of Grade 3 stuff and honey, it ain't easy at all. All the writing (and there are LOTS in the third grade program) and online activities and math practice take a big chunk of the day! And all the "absences" for those many self-proclaimed holidays--at the rate we're going, it will take us 207 more school days (or 10 calendar months!) to finish the entire program.

Nitoy's pace is improving though, and with the familiarity of daily practice, many of his fine motor skill-intensive tasks are becoming automatic. We expect our work to pick up speed up in a couple of months though, so while we might need to homeschool through the year, there should be no need to extend it past September 2010. We might need to be make the weekday schedule stricter--no interruptions allowed for five full days every week, limiting "holidays" and out-of-town trips to two days, not necessarily during the weekend.

Bonifacio Monument drive-by shoot

We didn't do anything towards the celebration of Bonifacio Day yesterday, having spent the day in Nueva Ecija for the family reunion with great-uncle Sid and his wife Prissy, so we were definitely pleasantly surprised to discover that the much-neglected memorial to our dear revolutionary hero Andres Bonifacio in the Balintawak cloverlead had been refurbished.

Gone was the general dinginess and accumulated grime, replaced by shiny, golden fixtures such as the national flag's eight-rayed sun motif, with the Katipunan's ka inscribed in written syllabic Tagalog for good measure:


In the middle stood stood Andres Bonifacio, in a mercuric a pose as ever. We were happy to see that he had a bolo in his right hand--people had been stealing this statue's bolos for decades now, whether for souvenirs or for practical purposed we don't really know. The raised MRT under construction had drastically changed the backdrop:


Nitoy was of course excited to see all the flags of the revolution aloft in both sides of Bonifacio's statue. What we parents noticed was the disconcerting absence of the people otherwise present here--pedestrians, jaywalkers, fruit peddlers, lost tourists, street children, vagrants, prostitutes, displaced katutubo from the north and the south, even "permanent residents" who used to take refuge under Bonifacio's armpits. Everyone had been fenced out of Bonifacio's memorial by iron grills. Somehow the fake bricks reminded us of the Guadalupe tuff that our enslaved ancestors had to dig, as polos y servicios, to fortify the walls of Intramuros. Bonifacio of Balintawak is now inaccessible to us, the common tao.

But we still intend to come back to this place someday when we talk at greater depth about the Philippine revolution, at least as far as a seven- or eight-year old could comprehend about the veracity of the events surrounding its beginnings. We might have to grapple against the bars of the fence like the indios of old trying to catch glimpses of festivities of the rarefied few of old Manila, but we will come back.

In photos: meeting great-uncle Sid

We'd been in Nueva Ecija almost every weekend this past month, and frankly, we were already quite worn out, but Papa didn't want to miss today's family gathering in San Antonio for the world. Great-uncle Sid who was in the country with his wife Prissy for the balik-tagpo (homecoming) over at the Nueva Ecija High School, and it was very important for Papa for his kids to meet his uncle.

This visit was one of those rare opportunities for Nitoy to see his late grandpa's brothers and to somehow imagine how Lolo Daddy might have looked like had he lived to see his grandchildren.

Top: Ningning Pongco-Garcia and Sid Pongco, siblings, in 2009
Bottom: Ningning Pongco and Sid Pongco in the 1950s, with the late Rene Pongco Sr. in the middle

Catching up with great-uncle Sid over great-aunt Ningning's cooking was basically an adult affair stretched many, many hours long. At the same time, all of the other Pongco grandkids were in the USA save for Nitoy and Inga...


...but it didn't mean that there was absolutely nothing for our homeschooler to do. For one, there were guavas to pluck from great-uncle Peping's tree. Coincidentally, we just learned about guavas in Filipino language arts class a few days past, so Nitoy really put some effort breaking off that sturdy stem:


There were gumamela (hibiscus) flowers to look at. We will surely pick a bunch of these when we get to the science lessons on reproduction and sexual dimorphism:


Unfamiliar insects to run away from:


Convex surfaces, the kind that made Papa's legs "disappear," to clown upon:


A garden pergola where one could quietly wash down platefuls of lumpia (spring rolls) with a certain contraband liquid:

"We are not amused," but Tito Eric definitely is!

Inside the Garcia's house, it was just about as fun. Every member of this family has a Facebook account, including Lola Ningning, the original Lola Techie!

Big monitors are imperative for the grandma set, LOL.

Except for Lolo Peping, that is. He and Nitoy did share a great love for geography though, so this colonial era globe was well observed:

Perfect! We also just learned about changes in political maps!

The day ended, the baby's patience expired, and everyone (save Mama the photog) posed for that last shot together:

Tito Ramon (aunt Prissy's brother), Eric Pongco, Nitz Pongco, Cherry Pongco, Rene Pongco Jr., Inga Pongco, Sid Pongco Jr., Nitoy Pongco, Prissy Pongco, Ningning Garcia, Ester Tinio (the Pongcos' cousin), and Peping Garcia. Abeng Llena (their uncle and great-uncle at the same time) was also here.

Hoping to see great-uncle Sid and great-aunt Prissy again in the near future. And hopefully, they will bring aunts Mary-Anne and Adrianne and their kids, too!

Calvert 3rd Grade, Lesson 25 highlights: regrouping, globes, moon rocket

No time for extensive blogging today, so here are some pics from throughout the day:

Math
At this point, we are now regrouping tens into hundreds in Calvert's 3rd grade math using the punch-out manipulatives from the Calvert Math textbook. Instruction time is more than doubled using this hands-on method, so at the last quarter of the lesson, I hid the #$%& manipulatives and ordered Nitoy to just solve the #$%& addition problems on paper like he learned in Singapore Math 2A. Done in a couple of minutes. :P

Calvert supplies plastic "connecting cubes" that we find too difficult to snap together, so we like these paper "blocks" from the textbook better. Fortunately we didn't buy that fancy set of Cuisenaire rods last year.

Reading
Nitoy did some regular worksheet stuff, and also found a way to keep his erasers from vanishing yet again, too:

Yes, he also puts his pencil on one ear. No, he has never seen a carpenter at work.

Social Studies
Determining the relative advantages and disadvantages of satellite photos vs. globes:

That would be the Calvert 3rd grade social studies textbook's intro to geography section, and that would be Nitoy holding the whole world in his hands.

Self-directed Projects
This one isn't exactly assigned in the Calvert program, but once in a while, Nitoy wants to make projects on things that interest him. The current themes seem to be The Adventures of Tintin and astronomy. And his project idea: the red checkered moon rocket of Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. A woven paper mat, three toilet paper rolls, and an empty Coke Zero bottle later:

"Earth to Proxima Centauri Control Center, a rocket is landing on one of your planets. It is not a bomb!"