Leaving Italy

No, we are not leaving Italy for good, but we will go up north for a while for our Christmas break. First to Berlin where we are going to house-sit and cat-sit at our friends' lovely place. Berlin is a fun place, full of history good and bad, museums, exhibitions and an interesting street life. Sophie and Jake are looking forward to it. They know Berlin quite well, but it will be their first time there in winter. After a couple of weeks we will see our extended families in Heidelberg which is something we are all looking forward to. And then, back to Italy in January - I will be back blogging then. Ciao e a presto!

Andy Warhol

Jake is doing some creative work in the style of Andy Warhol, designing soup tins, shoes and a BMW M1 - all on paper though, which he thinks is not doing justice to Andy's (and Jake's) genius. He would actually likus to paint the car but his parents are less adventurous than he is.

Signposts

 

We have been talking a lot about road signs lately. Why many of them feature red and white, why many tell you what not to do rather what to do. Sophie who is just learning to read realized she usually doesn't need to 'read' at all when she sees a road sign. We took a walk in the city, Jake taking photographs, Sophie walking around wide-eyed realizing how much she can 'read' already. 'Look, Mummy, there is a payphone! And there is a hotel close by... We are not supposed to take photographs here', et cetera. We even discovered ancient signs, carved in marble about hundreds of years ago when Venice ruled Verona and spread its icon, the winged lion of Saint Mark, all over the place.

Back to Italy

I have been away for a week, visiting some good old friends of mine in Canada. As rewarding as educating the children at home can be, I so much needed a break to take in fresh air and spend some time in an environment that is free of demands
While I was away, Sophie's and Jake's dad took over. His approach is very different from mine, and that is a good thing. I guess his way of doing things is a lot more structured than mine and the children seemed to like that. I browsed through the algebra Jake had written down while I had been away and realized they had worked a lot. It is great to have other people sharing the effort to school your own because they bring in fresh air, doing things differently, presenting the children with alternative ways to think, create and communicate. And even though no one said so, it must have been great for the kids too to have a break from me... I am happy to be back!

The classroom by the river

Italy's great weather sometimes seems to be a myth without foundation. In Verona it has been raining for three consecutive days. The Adige river is getting bigger and bigger by the minute. The fact that we live close by the river has prompted the kids to go and check, most importantly to report on how the trees are doing. The trees live on the banks of the river, but are now flooded so that you can only see their tops. You can tell that the waters of the Adige have come all the way down from the Alps and that it must have rained a lot there too.
One day in early fall we went up all the way to the Alto Adige into the Val Venosta where the Adige is little more than a stream. Oh, how much I like being able to take these strolls to the river front, to stand there with the kids in pouring rain, discussing rivers and streams, wondering if the water will uproot the trees, why it actually rains at all, and why eventually the Adige's waters will end up in the sea - oh, and why sea water is salty, of course. It's nasty weather and those few people who happen to pass by do so in a hurry. And tomorrow, finally, there's going to be some sun, so the weather forecast tells me.

A world map of stamps

Jake collects lots of things. Marbles. Stones. Sea shells. Seeds. And stamps. Around lunchtime every day he runs down the stairs, all the way from the third to the ground floor, to check the letter box for letters or postcards with stamps on them. Sadly, very little of our mail has a good old-fashioned stamp attached to it. With the help of his two stamp-collecting grandfathers and a number of friends who kindly keep any stamps they come across, he has managed to generate a collection of several hundred stamps. They come from all over the world, some of them from countries Jake has not even heard of.
This week, Jake took out his stamp album to see which countries the stamps come from and where these countries are. We laid out a huge world map on a piece of thick cardboard. Using pins, Jake marked the countries from which he holds stamps. Tanzania, Iceland, Paraguay, Romania, Japan, Madagascar... Allocating twenty countries to their respective continents and finding them on the map took almost the entire morning. Sophie and Jake were proud of the result. They went downstairs to check the letter box three times that day - just in case someone has happened to send us a postcard from Mauritius...

Venetian diary writing

Jake has been writing a diary for almost eleven months, not having missed a single day! It was his idea because he likes remembering things. Dishes he ate, people he met, places he saw, gifts he received, paintings he made. The diary entries vary in length. Mostly he writes three to six sentences but sometimes he fills the entire page and needs to glue in another sheet of paper. In summertime he had a lot to write about because he recorded every Worldcup game he watched and every fruit and vegetable he harvested from the garden. His handwriting and spelling have changed a lot due to his diary-writing. He tries out different spellings and eventually looks up the correct spelling in the dictionary. He has also been experimenting with different styles of handwriting.
Last Friday Jake went to Venice for the day to show the city to a friend who was staying with us for a few days. If you have ever been to Venice you can imagine how busy he was while being there... and that he needed several pages to record what they'd seen...