They LOOKED like huckleberries

Our church group had an ice cream social tonight. We were in charge of toppings--chopped nuts, whipping cream, chocolate syrup. And I figured I could make fruit sauce, too,if there were still huckleberries at the produce market.

This morning I found a wrinkled old lady perched on the sidewalk just outside the produce market, selling plastic bags full of the berries. They were only 2 KM, about $1--a fraction of the price I'd paid for huckleberries I bought a few weeks ago at the produce market. "I'll have to always buy from the people on the sidewalk," I thought to my frugal self. I bought 2 bags, figuring I'd freeze one for our family.



Then I took them home and sat down to sort through them before I started cooking. That was my first hint that something might be wrong. One of them was connected to an evergreen needle. And they seemed a little hard. I stuck one in my mouth and bit down. Instead of that succulent burst of huckleberry juice, it was grainy, and my mouth filled with the taste of Christmas tree--not gingerbread or candy canes but tree.

I think they're juniper berries. (At least last time I bought mystery food it was on purpose.)

Luckily our neighborhood supermarket had frozen cherries and berries, and I
cooked up 2 very nioe fruit sauces. But now I have two big bags of juniper berries. Any ideas?

I've been using Orangette as my go-to cooking source here, but she's no help on this one.

Letters with Little Hats

The Bosnian alphabet is like our English alphabet with a few differences. Đ is a letter, for example, and there are several consonants that have accent-thingies or little hats: diacritical marks to the precise among you.

ć
č
dž
š
ž

When I see these letters, I think, "Oh, it's a c with a little hat," but this is not how a Bosnian speaker thinks. To him, č and c are no more alike than d and b are to an English speaker. There are similarities in how you write them, but the letters are completely different. (As I learn time after time when I can't find words in the dictionary because I'm looking under the wrong letter!)

Isaac’s school is named for a poet whose name requires many diacritical marks: Musa Ćazim Ćatić. When Isaac got his Cossack-like school jacket,

we were tickled to see that even the monogramming doesn't ignore those marks.


Although I have problems with the concept that a letter with a diacritcal mark is not the same as a letter without a diacritical mark, Eleanor has it down pat. Recently I was trying to write a word she had learned in kindergarten, and I was having problems with the spelling. “Is that with a z?” I asked her.

She rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s not. ‘Z’ is like this z-z-z-z-z. Listen to this. ‘Zh-zh-zh-zh-zh.’ You write it like this.” She took the pencil from my hand and wrote ž.

To me, a z with a little hat on it. To Bosnians, and to my daughter, not a z at all.

It's kind of close, even if it is a man's name

I have a hard time remembering people's names here in Bosnia because usually they are unrelated to any other name I've ever heard of.

It apparently works the other way, too. When I went to the bank today, the bank teller took the form I had filled out with our names and typed it into her computer system like this:

Ahmet i David

That's me! Ahmet!

Rain, rain, rain

Emma Lucy, along with other students from her high school, volunteers by spending time with a 9 year old autistic girl. The little girl has a favorite nursery rhyme about talking to an umbrella vendor. She repeats the rhyme over and over, so Emma Lucy learned it and taught it to us. It's perfect for the weather we've been having:

Dobar dan. Dobar dan.(Good day. Good day.)
Imateli kišobran? (Do you have umbrellas?)
Nemamo. Kišobran je rasprodan. (We don't. Umbrellas are sold out.)
Dođite vam drugi dan. (Come another day.)

(David points out that it shares its final line with the English nursery rhyme about rain--Rain, rain go away. Come again another day.)


Given the sidewalk vendors that emerge like mushrooms on rainy days, it doesn't look like the kišobran in Sarajevo are in any danger of being rasprodan.

Waterfalls

On Saturday, we hiked to Skakavac, a dramatic waterfall high in the hills of Sarajevo.



Today, it rained and we hiked through the waterfalls that our city streets had become.

Why is it so much easier to teach them math?

Sometimes I think that the things I am most qualified to teach are the things I am least competent at teaching. Is this because I assume too much? Because I know enough to realize how poorly I teach it?

I have a Master's degree in English literature and worked during college as a writing tutor. I have published a couple of pieces and kept a journal since I was fourteen years old. I know my way around a paragraph.

And yet the single most contentious part of our homeschooling experience this year has been journaling. I let the kids pick their own notebooks to use as their daily journals. I gathered interesting writing prompts. I tried to pare down my expectations (five vivid sentences a day from Isaac, three from Eleanor), and yet they both hate writing in their journals.

I'm determined not to give up on journaling. Learning to write--not to handwrite or to spell but to convey ideas--is too central to the learning process in early elementary school (an interesting article on that topic). Even so, this week, I was too tired to battle Isaac over his journal. "Write about what you want to."

"Really? Anything?"

"Yep."



He wrote for an hour and forty-five minutes that day and then forty-five minutes the next to produce a manual for the computer game Starcraft.

I'm thrilled, but not sure how to build on this little glimmer of success. In the past when I've told him he can write about what he wants, he has just whined that he can't think of anything. Any suggestions for ways to help my kids love writing?

Faces of Sarajevo

More of the faces that watch us walking the streets.

Found: Bosnian Tooth Fairy

This week Nenad, Isaac's friend from school, lost his first tooth. He got ten marks from the tooth fairy.

I was surprised. Surprised by the amount of money the tooth fairy dropped on his pillow--just over 7 US dollars. The tooth fairy who visits our home likes coins. Small coins. (Of course, Nenad's mom is a dentist, so maybe this is professional courtesy.)

I was even more surprised, however, that the tooth fairy made an appearance at all as I had recently been informed that there is no tooth fairy in Bosnia.

I asked Nenad's dad what was up. Is there a tooth fairy in Bosnia or not? He told me that there is, indeed, a Bosnian tooth fairy, but she does not visit Muslim children.

Who knew that there were religious implications to the tooth fairy?

(Incidentally, every dentist office here, it seems, has a tooth as its sign. Here are a couple of dentist signs we pass on our day-to-day errands.)

Graphing Candy

After a brief interruption with sickness (hmmm...is there a connection? hundreds of pieces of candy and sick children?), we finished up our Halloween math with Venn Diagrams, bar charts, and pie charts.






Now how to make all that candy unobtrusively disappear without disappearing into those tender little tummies?

Heads

I love the carvings (stone? plaster? I'm not sure) on Austro-Hungarian buildings (ca. 19th century) here in Sarajevo. Two of my favorite sets of ladies, peering over the street from two and three stories up, watch our walk to and from school.

Chocolate, Roses, and Rocks Colored with Crayons

A boy in Eleanor's kindergarten gave her this hand-decorated rock. She loves it.

Measuring Halloween Candy

Today we measured Halloween candy in as many ways as we could think of (except for their caloric measurement!).

Isaac finds his longest and fattest pieces.


Stretched end to end, 211 pieces of candy are remarkably long (1094 cm.).


We don't have scales, so we rigged up this balance scale with a hanger and plastic bags.


Here Isaac and Eleanor investigate how many pieces of candy equal the weight of one apple (25, in case you were wondering).

What do you do with all the candy after Halloween?

Our kids got a lot of Halloween candy. One hundred fifity six pieces for Eleanor, two hundred and eleven pieces for Isaac--and most of it not even stuff I'm interested in stealing.

In the interest of making myself less annoyed by all the candy piled up around our house, we're skipping our regular math and doing Halloween candy math this week. Today we did activities oriented around counting. Eleanor, who is still developing basic ideas of place value, counted all her candy by ones and then by tens.





Isaac has more developed number sense and is about to start a multiplication unit, so after he counted all his pieces (which he did by counting every other piece and then added the total to itself!), I had him count the sets of 3, 4, and 5.



At first, he was a bit confused by the "orphan" candy, the ones that didn't fit into sets. It led us to a discussion of factoring and prime numbers, and we discovered that he got a prime number of pieces of candy!

Don't know if it's worth ever trick-or-treating again with a record like that to beat.

Buying produce in the fall

The few tomatoes left at the produce market are mealy and spotted, but all sorts of wonderful things have replaced them.



This was my haul on my last big produce shopping trip: root vegetables, big bags stuffed full of spinach, and cabbage. There are great mountains of cabbage, 1 KM, or about 75 cents for a head of cabbage.

I find myself buying stuff that I don't recognize. The vendor called this "black turnip" or "black chard" or possibly "black beet"--my handy dictionary is not so handy with vegetable names.



I'm pretty sure it's rutabaga, but not positive. Anyway, it tastes wonderful roasted with turnips, beets, and carrots.

How to Make a Halloween Costume in Bosnia, III

And for the final Halloween installment (Parts 1 and 2), here are the big people's costumes.

I was a ghost along with Eleanor.


Emma Lucy was the Mad Hatter. She made her top hat out of typing paper. That girl has talent.


And David was a Zelena Beretka, or Green Beret--the term for the local men who fought to defend Sarajevo during the siege. He gets the great souvenir of a surplus camouflage jacket and a green beret, too.


Happy Halloween!