It Really Was No Miracle...

The day before Rebecca was supposed to come over to hang out, her mom phoned me.  "I was just calling to let you know that Rebecca is very into the movie The Wizard of Oz right now."  I was having a terrible time hearing what she was saying as I walked through Campo de' Fiori, but nodded and squinted anyhow as she talked.  She continued, "Her favorite song is this song with all of these 'itch' words, like witch, pitch, stitch...I was thinking maybe you guys could do something with that tomorrow."  I've seen The Wizard of Oz about as many times as your average American girl, which is a bunch, but I couldn't recall a song like what she was describing.  "Sure," I replied, "just email me the name of the song."

It was this:

 I did a bit of preparations before Rebecca came the next day:

First I found the lyrics to the song

Then I cut out each lyric line, numbered them, and scrambled them up

After that, I made a little pocket out of a pic I found of the famous foursome

Finally I stuck the mixed up lyrics inside of the pocket.

When Rebecca came, it was business as usual.  We had a little chat, then went through our routine:

We went over her homework

She read me what she'd written in her communication journal

I wrote her a note back

She took her spelling test

and we learned 8 more lines of the poem we started last week

Having gotten all of that out of the way, I casually pulled out The Wizard of Oz pocket and the best-kept secret:

never underestimate the power of a new pen--or 20 of them

oh, the possibilities!

Rebecca is an artist.  She couldn't contain her excitement.  "Oh!  These are wonderful!" she shrieked, "I'm using peach and lilac!"

Together we worked on rhyming, spelling, suffixes, word order, idioms, and more using her favorite song of the moment:

Having so much to do but so little time, we moved along to a book that Rebecca has been wanting to read to me for the last couple of lessons.  She'd brought it from home, and read it aloud to me:

It's a sweet story with a wonderful message

"Can we do the craft now?" she asked when she'd finished reading the last page.  I shook my head and replied, "Not until we read our book of the week."  Last week we'd read The Persian Cinderella, which she enjoyed very much.  I thought it would be great to compare and contrast it with the following:

Rebecca peered at the cover of the book for quite some time, then started, "Don't tell me that's Cinderella..."  "Of course it is!" I replied excitedly.  "Why wouldn't it be?" She shrugged and smiled, and I began reading the story aloud to her.

my favorite page

When the story was finished, Rebecca agreed that it was a lovely read, but readily admitted she prefers the Persian version.  (Truth be told, so do I, but the Korean version is lovely as well.)

"Now can we make the craft?" she pleaded.  I nodded and suggested it might be cool to make a fan inspired by the illustrations in the book:

She agreed, but we only had six or seven minutes to work on it...so she did the best she could with the time she had:

An adorable fan inspired by The Korean Cinderella in under 6 minutes...imagine what she could have come up with in 10.