Our Schedule in China

We've been in china for a little over a month now, and we're finally (sort of) settling into a rhythm of our days.

(NERD NOTE: Sorry for the wait on this post, Diablo IV came out and I spent about a week playing it - playing on the PS5 is fine (I've learned how to use a controller) but the server lag is pretty bad, and I'm connecting using an alternate DNS (open to recommendations) which I think is attributing to the lag being so bad. I'm hoping in the next few weeks it'll sort it self out. The game basically becomes unplayable after about 10pm our time so I haven't gotten to do as much as I normally would, but looking forward to season 1!)

Unfortunately, (I may have already said this at some point) we got here too late in the school year to reasonably have them finish out the curriculum, but they're going to take the entrance exams in august to start at Keith's school, which is called the Huitong/Whittle School. It doesn't currently have an IEP program but they said that they can assign Nolan an aide, so hopefully I can get some one on one time with the school and this particular aide to go over the behavior goals etc and have it have a chance of working out. 

The kids start homeschool at about 10am, and we begin with math, really just to get it out of the way. I've been using the Pennsylvania standards for second grade to try to catch up Nolan so he can start 3rd grade at a relative even footing with the other students. For Oliver this is mostly review, but I do try to challenge him by using different materials. I've been using  K-5 Learning for a lot of my classroom materials, especially for math. We recently purchased addition/subtraction flash cards and have started doing drills with Nolan to help internalize the single and double digit math problems. We started with place value and jumped right into fractions, but I had grabbed 4th grade materials without thinking about it and it quickly became apparent that it was a mistake. Lately we've been working on identifying fractions, their equivalents, and identifying fractions in a group. We're getting there, but the drills I think are helping. We also got one of those fraction manipulatives which helps with visualizing the concept.

After math, we typically do a Chinese lesson. I've been using Little Chinese Learners, and each unit is supposed to be broken up into weeks, but when I first started with the program I was using the free version so I was just doing one unit per day as each of the beginning units were pretty easy- hello, my name is, 1-10, etc. Now that we're getting into naming family members and adjectives I did purchase the first tier version and have been able to slow the the lessons down a bit.

After Chinese we take a long break, mostly for my sanity, but this week we've been getting outside and walking around the city a bit. Chinese people are nice, though we do get a few awkward stares, but the  people who stop me to chat are mostly women asking me about the boys. You would think by now that I would have the words for "Are they twins?" memorized, but the only ones I recognize are "liang ge hai zi" (two children) and then I just automatically respond with their ages and that works, most of the time. My other favorite response is "ting bu dong" which just means "Dont understand". Whats funny about the "are they twins?" question is that its the same internationally. Americans, Qatari, Chinese, they all ask. We go to Japan next month for a few weeks and I'll be sure to update if that gets asked there, too. 

some photos of our walks

my poor, sweaty boys

a neat lil grassy area we go to, theres a pretty decent breeze 

saw a cool boat

this was from a day where it was less than 90 degrees (rare)

We eat lunch either before or after the walk, and Oliver eats a peanut butter and honey sandwich and Nolan eats ramen noodles. I read somewhere recently that getting hyperactive children on a more protein-heavy diet can help them build neural pathways that can help regulate themselves better but I havent been able to work out a reasonable dish that I can whip up in 7 minutes like ramen noodles. Also, Oliver is just the pickiest eater!

After we get back from our break we do writing and a reading comprehension activity, and finish out with reading aloud or listening to an audiobook and filling out some comprehension worksheets that Keith made up. I try to encourage self-lead reading time, but both boys aren't really engaged with the books and I'm loathe to make it a chore. I try to remind them that they're working to show us that theyre ready for their new school ( and maybe a toy or something) but lately since I got some printer paper delivered they like having special coloring pages printed out and theyre happy to work for those. 

After school there's about an hour for Keith to get home and its usually when I clean the kitchen and sweep the apartment, and prep something for dinner. I've gotten pretty good at making rice and a simple stir-fry noodle dish. Ive also gotten into making meatballs. We'll occasionally having dumplings or bao for dinner, but Oliver hasnt found a variety that he likes yet and lets us know about it. WE'll eat around 6pm here as its the time that we sit down and watch Good Mythical Morning on youtube together- its (usually) pretty kid friendly and the kids like to pretend that they're the hosts. Everyone gets free time during the evening and we typically do our bedtime routines between 8 and 830pm. 

Its been a little bit difficult on my part to find time for myself in all of this moving around, but I did get to play video games and I have been working on drawing semi-regularly. 

Keith's classes just handed in final exams this week, and they've all been graded! The final day of classes is the second week of July, and the following week we're headed to Japan. Hope to update you guys on that soon. 

Thanks for reading :) 

Kristen