Kindergarten
I feel like I've been getting a lot of questions lately about where Monkey and Bug go to school or, if the person knows we homeschool, what curriculum we're doing. I never really have a good answer for the latter. My answer, "Well, I have a phonics book we're doing, and a playgroup we're in, but mostly I just let them do their own thing, . . ." Isn't exactly an accurate description of how much I think they're learning and always leaves me feeling just a bit guilty that I don't have more intentional activities with them. So, this week I decided to look up the education standards for kindergarten--just to see what I really needed to teach them in the future--and, boy, do I feel validated! They are well into the kindergarten material for math and language arts, and they've all but completed the science standards (I still need to go through the standards for social studies, fine arts, and health & PE).

In light of these findings, I've started a new method of record keeping (don't worry the blog will continue). I now have a binder, divided by subject. Each section includes the list of standards, a list of resources they girls have been using to complete the standards, and whatever else I feel I need to keep in there (the language arts section, for example, includes several suggested reading lists for kindergartners I've run across). I love this blog as a creative outlet for me that lets family keep tabs on us, and as a weekly rundown of their activities and progress. The binder gives me a bigger picture of what they've learned, what we need to work on, and how we're going about it. Also, I can now tell people, "Well, we follow the [ABC] standards using the resources that work best for my kids for different subjects." So, here's what they've been up to this week:


Library Day
Still no storytime (but it starts up again next week!). We sat on cushions in the kids' section and read lots of books, and the entourage chose to bring these home:
Oregon's Journey
Truman's Aunt Farm
A Ball for Daisy
My Little Car / Mi Carrito
Brave Charlotte and the Wolves
Snow Rabbit, Spring Rabbit
Four Seasons Make a Year

"This month is confused!"
Said Bug this week when the weather went from almost 80 degrees one day to 30 degrees two days later! Perhaps compounding the confusion for the girls is that we've been talking about the passage of time alot--using clocks, their calendar, and books about seasons. They know from books and the calendar that January is winter, not spring, but they spent an afternoon this week looking for all the signs of spring in our yard--flowers on the shrubs, new grass and weeds in the backyard, etc. They asked when we're going to go to the beach. Then, two days later they ask if it's going to snow. It's one of those weeks when I'm actually glad I'm not one of those moms who's organized enough to have all the summer clothes put away.


Pet Rocks
The girls discovered a bag of polished stones in the craft drawer this week and created a whole menagerie of pet rocks. They also discovered that they were using washable markers, so they could change how their pets looked, and this project kept them occupied for quite a while. Not to mention how much fun they've had counting and sorting them, putting them to bed, etc.

Reading
Last week's practice in sounding out particularly helped Bug this week. She's been much more confident in tackling new words and reads a new sentence or two almost everyday. She's also added the sounds n and f. Monkey continues to need more reinforcement of the sounding out concept, but she succeeded several times this week in sounding out words all by herself and even read another sentence or two.

Math
This week I restarted being more intentional about practicing counting with the girls. Goose has almost conquered reciting 1-10 (she still forgets about the number 6), but it's mostly Bug who's been practicing with her. Monkey and Bug are confident up to 15, and we're working on sorting out the last few teens. I've also started teaching them to count by tens. They understand that the numbers go 1-9 then start over, but they can never remember what number prefix comes next. Using an abacus, a menagerie of pet rocks, dried beans, and toothpicks we also verified that they are capable of adding and subtracting using manipulatives (keeping all our numbers smaller than 15, of course), and can even solve problems like: Given a set of rocks, how many more do they need to make 10?

When they were done counting, they got got out the playdough.
The addition of toothpicks and beans made for some neat creations!

States of Matter
I'm not sure what initiated it, but Monkey and Bug have been very focused on sorting out solids, liquids, and gases. They've been going through the house finding samples of each, but my original definitions fell short, since Bug was quite convinced that a blanket was a liquid. We cleared things up by first reading from a lesson about liquids on Chem4Kids.com, watching a kids' music video of They Might Be Giants singing "Solid, Liquid, Gas," and finally applying the definition first hand by pouring water into a container and then attempting to pour a blanket and seeing a that while the water filled up every space, the blanket did not. Next we followed water through all three states: we filled a small container with water and put it in the freezer; we checked on it periodically until it turned into ice; then popped it out into a saucepan, melted it to liquid again, and boiled it away to steam. Then Bug proposed her own experiment to figure out how many glasses of water it would take to fill the container. She kept track of her results by writing tally marks on a piece of paper.

Opposites
All three girls have been obsessed with opposites this week. For Goose this means enacting them: up/down, in/out, on/off, etc. with potentially annoying results like when she decides to illustrate on/off with the reading light I'm attempting use. (In that case, she learned that being considerate of others takes priority over practicing fascinating new concepts.) For Monkey and Bug, the obsession means coming up with endless lists of opposite and trying to sort out that things like light and dark are considered opposites, while table and chair are not.

Potty Training
For the past couple of months, Goose has been telling me when she needs a new diaper, "practicing" going on the potty chair like her big sisters, and begging for underwear. So this week I agreed, and we started potty training. I attempted the 3-day method, which Aunt A and I pulled off with much success with her big sisters. I confess I wasn't able to give her the hyper-vigilance we gave her sisters (I'm doing it solo this time after all), but by day 6 we determined that Goose's brain had outpaced her body's ability to get to the potty in time (only two instances of real success--all the pee in the potty, not the floor--during the entire week). On day 4 of staying home, we were all going a bit stir crazy (Picture Bug lying spread eagle on the living room floor, wailing, "I just want to get out of the house! I'm tired of stepping in peepee all the time! I just can't take it anymore!" Oh boy, can I sympathize!) I decided to put Goose in Pull ups, so we could resume our normal out-of-the-house activities, then back into underwear when we were home. By Friday, Goose wasn't making any progress, she wanted to stay in Pull ups, and increasingly told me to "Stop staying that!" (regarding reminders to tell me if she needed to potty) and "Don't follow me!" (regarding my trying to stay within arms reach to rush her to the potty). We discussed how frustrating it was to have accidents all the time and how we would try again when her body was a little bigger. I told her that I would leave her alone about it, but that she was still welcome to try going on the potty, which she's done several times since then, so I feel good about the decision to back off.

While potty training itself wasn't a success, the entourage did enjoy the first three days of just staying home with me not trying to accomplish anything other than sticking to Lucy. We put together lots of puzzles (Bug even conquered the big floor puzzle!), built lots of towers, castles, houses, etc. (I rearranged the playroom a bit, so all the various blocks and building materials are in one corner; this has inspired alot of architectural creativity), colored dozens of coloring book pages, sang lots of classic preschool songs, and read lots and LOTS of books (interestingly, a great deal of nonfiction this week on subjects ranging from shapes, colors, and opposites to geography and ancient history). I also came up with several fun cooking projects we could do together that the made the days just a little more exciting: We made chocolate chip cookies and even Goose got more involved in the process than usual (Bug even let her help hold the electric mixer). We made, built with, and obviously ate Jello Jiggler blocks. And, after reading the book repeatedly, we made green eggs and ham for dinner one night.

Reading
We missed a few reading lessons this week in my attempts to stay focused on Goose, but both Monkey and Bug got to read new sentences this week. During the latter part of the week, I realized they were depending mostly on sight reading (with just limited letter sounds to work with the same words do keep coming up, but they would do things like interchange "the" and "that" because the first sound is the same). So we spent the last couple days of this week using the white boards to review sounding out skills, which seems to have been productive.

Doctor Visit
Goose had her two year old well check this week, and she was very brave! We had talked a lot beforehand about what was going to happen, and I had recently weighed the girls on the scale at the Y, so that at least was a familiar experience. She also spent most of the visit clutching her "Daddy Buddy," a stuffed superhero with Daddy's picture on it. And, she is definitely Daddy's girl--very healthy, but tall and skinny!

Time
This week we hung the girls' calendar on the back of their easel in the playroom, and they have loved having ready access to it. The month of January is almost entirely covered in marker, and they have been very faithful about taking turns crossing off the days and talking about what day of the week it is. Particularly motivating this week was counting down the days until Saturday when Miss K, our new babysitter, came to stay with them while I got a morning out of the house to myself (it was lovely, and the girls had a great time too).

Bug also started wearing her watch again this week and has been asking what time certain things will happen and keeping track of how much time is passing. She can't actually tell time yet, but she's getting a much better sense of how it passes.

"Jobs"
I noticed this week that the girls took on recurring interest/roles. Bug decided to create games this week. She  drew several board games on large pieces of paper, and recruited Goose and I to play with her. I admit the object of the games were kind of lost on me, but the process was fun. She also figured out the ideal procedure for putting puzzles together (corners, edges, then inside pieces). Monkey was an event planner this week. At one point she actually took Goose and I on a tour of the house, showing us all the fun things we could choose from to do on our stay-at-home day. She also planned several "birthday" parties for either Goose or Bug, complete with picnics of play food spread out on a blanket in the living room or on the playtable, elaborate Duplo block cakes (so that she can actually "cut" slices with a plastic knife), and presents to open packaged in little paper boxes from their Tear-agami book. The only problem occurred when Goose wanted to tear into the "cake" before Monkey had declared it time.

Back to Church
After so much travelling, we finally got back to activities at our own church. Sunday we had the usual classes and worship service with the extra fun of a potluck luncheon followed by participation in an assembly line to fill hygiene bags for the mission team to Haiti to take with them in a few weeks. The girls, including Goose, probably filled a half dozen bags each and were very excited about sending things like new toothbrushes and washcloths to people in Haiti. Wednesday night suppers at church also started up again. Bug did not want to go to her class, but I'm taking it as a sign of increasing emotional maturity that she didn't have a meltdown about it. I got us to church about 10 minutes early so the girls had some time in their classroom without all the other kids, we had talk about how she usually enjoyed the different activities (projects, stories, etc.) , and their teacher got them involved enough in some pre-class activities that Goose and I were able to leave without incident--well, except that Goose desperately wanted to stay with Miss K and all the other kids.

Library Day
Another library day with just us and the librarians. The girls even commented on how quiet it was. This week we stayed to read books, and the girls even introduced the librarians to our current favorite book, How Do You Wokka Wokka? by quoting some of it to them. The librarians were impressed and even looked up the book for potential use in a future storytime. We came home with these books:
Bears: Polar Bears, Black Bears, and Grizzly Bears ("what do you want to learn about" book)
The Gingerbread Man
Toddlerobics
Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed
Whooo's Haunting the Teeny Tiny Ghost?
Dancing Granny
My Teacher for President

Zoo Day
I decided to take a last opportunity for a mini-roadtrip before potty training Goose, and we headed to the zoo one day this week. That membership has definitely been worth it! We've probably made a half dozen trips to that zoo, and we continue to have new and exciting experiences. When we arrived we could actually hear the monkeys from the parking lot! I think they must be enjoying the cooler weather, because we couldn't remember hearing them before. Once we arrived at their exhibit, we observed their enthusiastic activities and their breakfast menu for a bit, and then Bug informed us that "Actually, they're apes, not monkeys, because they don't have tails." Bravo for the little zoologist! We checked out their sign and discovered that they were indeed apes--siamang gibbons to be exact.

My monkeys watching zoo monkeys--no, I mean, apes!

We happened to go on the zoo's storytime day, so we got to participate in a storytime about animal ears. I was very proud of Bug for being willing to speak up and answer questions that the reader asked of the group. This week we also discovered the vulture's nest (It's huge! The vultures themselves, however, were hiding; although we got to see one later.), and an exhibit of mole rats we hadn't seen before. This was particularly interesting in light of one of our library selections this week since the exhibit included naked mole rats. We spent a particularly long time in the aquarium, since we've usually rushed that experience on our way out of the zoo, and the entourage spent great deal of time observing the komodo dragons: noting particular features (scales, long claws, holes instead of "normal" ears), noticing that we could see their necks expanding as they breathe (followed by putting our hands on each other's chest to feel us breathing), and comparing the komodos to their toy dragons (forked tongues--yes; fire--no; wings--no, but they have 4 legs instead of 2, so the komodos would be better at walking and climbing). The entourage was holding up particularly well, so we decided to stay later than usual and watch a bird show featuring local predatory birds, including those vultures that we missed earlier.

No zoo visit is complete without climbing on the statues!

Reading
The girls continue making progress! Reading her first sentence seemed to be a breakthrough experience for Monkey: now she usually requests having a sentence to read (which means I end up composing them out of the words involved in that day's lesson), and she's even been sounding out words without assistance! Bug has gotten far enough in the book that her lessons usually involve reading a sentence, and she added a new sound this week (o as in ox).

Goose has been taking shorter or no naps at all this week, so she's been up and about for more of our lessons, and she doesn't want to be left out! She doesn't have the articulation or pencil control to do many of the tasks, but I figure I can at least start teaching her the letter sounds in the order they're presented as long as she's requesting lessons. So far she's worked on m, s, and a (as in apple). She can match up letters to sounds with reasonable accuracy during a lesson, but I've yet to ask her anything outside of that context. She also likes to "wite yetters!" (write letters) by practicing scribbles on her white board.


Topics of Discussion This Week

• Evergreen plants (defining and excitedly identifying them)
• Attributes of God (how big, strong, old, etc., He is)
• Calendars (usual activities for months and weeks)
• Medicines and pharmacies (different meds for different sicknesses, how the pharmacist knows what to give people, etc.)
• Banking (We deposited checks into their savings accounts this week, so we talked again about how banks work and what savings [as opposed to checking] accounts are for)

Stay-at-home Days
After all the excitement of Christmas and traveling to see family, the entourage and I enjoyed several stay-at-home days this week. They had plenty of time to play with their new toys and settle back into the familiar routine. The additional Playmobils, fairies, and family dolls were quickly incorporated into the usual pretend play. We read lots of the new books and even managed to find shelf space for all of them!

Hard at work painting dinosaurs

Maybe the biggest sign that they just needed stay-at-home days was the brevity of this weeks library day. We were in and out in less than 30 minutes! They didn't even want to stick around and read books. They quickly located a favorite airplane book (Airshow about a girl their age who attends an airshow with her family; it features labeled drawings of lots of airplanes including a number of military ones that are always favorites) and a copy of The 20th Century Children's Book Treasury, which they picked because they remember reading from it at Grandma's house.

They're Getting So BIG!
All the girls hit big milestones this week. Goose is now in a toddler bed instead of a crib. They are all very excited about this development, and Goose has handled the new freedom superbly. In fact, she wanders out from naptime or nighttime with less frequency than one of her older sisters! This is one of those cases where I think it's been really helpful to have them all in the same room, and she can just follow her big sisters lead (or get dragged back to the bedroom by them, which I'm pretty sure has happened on at least one occasion). A couple of days after Goose's big switch, Monkey and Bug switched from 5-point car seats to "big kid" booster seats. The only catch is that while they can't buckle themselves in anymore (we're working on it), they can unbuckle themselves. Fortunately, that hasn't happened while we've been on the road yet, and we had a long and serious preventative discussion about it (with the threat of putting them back in car seats if it becomes a problem). So far, so good, and they are loving the additional freedom to wiggle!

Reading
We started daily reading lessons back up with much success! Monkey and Bug jumped right in with enthusiasm. Bug read several more sentences this week and added a new sound (c as in cat).
Monkey read her first complete sentence this week, and she also added a letter sound to her repertoire (i as in sit). Bug also wrote another email to Daddy and spent a fair amount of time on the desktop computer just typing away at a string of seemingly random letters in Word.

Fractions
Bug was rummaging through the game cabinet this week and came across the set of fraction bars we bought a while back. I agreed to open up the rest of them (only 1 through 1/4s were loose) and explained how they worked. She very quickly understood that the number on the bottom of the fraction means it takes that many parts to make up a whole bar. I also showed her that you can play around with them and use different fraction pieces to make a whole (so, 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4 still makes 1). I walked away and she spent another 5 or 10 minutes arranging them on her own.

Calendar
I decided we needed to start intentionally working on the concept of time--not telling time on clocks but the concepts of days, weeks, months, and years. To this end we bought a calendar for the entourage that has a new coloring page every month. We sat down one day this week and compared my calendar to theirs, talked about all the months that make up a year, what month we're in now, how each day has a number, what today was (and crossed off the couple of days in January we'd already passed), and what the names of days of the week were. This last item was followed by countless renditions of the days of the week song (to the tune of "The Adams Family"). My plan is to mark important days in each month as we enter it, and to keep up the habit of crossing off days and noting which day of the week it is.

Christmas Money!
Perhaps the highlight of the week was taking the entourage to our new favorite toy store (small, local place that stocks all--and only--my favorite brands). We discussed their budget and that they may see things they wanted that they didn't have enough to buy. They listened patiently, and it must have sunk in because they didn't have any problem accepting that several items were out of their price range. We spent a long time browsing the store and playing with the various items out on display before they made any decisions. First, they decided to split the cost of two things to share: a set of three bathtub boats and a big box of Marbleworks. With the money they had left they bought a couple of wind up toys (the obsession with automatons continues!) and several plastic figures from a bin they've admired for a long time. Goose was particularly excited about her purchase from the figure bin--a shimmery, purple, five-headed dragon, whose first act in pretend play was to attempt to eat the fairy figures her sisters bought. Don't you just love little sisters?

Merry Christmas!
We had two Christmases as usual this year: one with Daddy's family and one with mine. It was great fun to see family we don't see very often, and the girls enjoyed admiring and, when appropriate, playing with the grandparents' Christmas decorations. The girls have lots of great new toys to play with and, so typical of the entourage's interests, practically a whole bookshelf of new books to read. Two of their favorites, How Do You Wokka Wokka? and Orange Peel's Pocket, are already being actively memorized so they can "read" them themselves.

While not technically new experiences, none of the girls remember trying the traditional holiday foods from the two households in previous years. For Christmas Eve, Daddy's family serves tamales and Mommy's family has crab soup (a twist on the traditional Irish fish or oyster stew). "New" foods were tasted and thoroughly enjoyed along with an abundance of Christmas treats. At Grandma and Granddad's house, they also helped with decorating the gingerbread cookies. Even Goose decorated quite a few; although we still need to work on not smashing the lids of sprinkle containers into the frosting on the cookie.

Christmas Secrets
This was the first year that the entourage did any Christmas shopping. I had taken the girls shopping for Daddy and the grandparents before we started travelling, and Nana even took them shopping for me once we arrived at our first stop. I was very impressed that the girls managed to keep all those gifts a secret until they were opened considering how excited they were about the purchases. When they burst through the door after shopping with Nana, Bug exclaimed, "Mommy! We bought--um. . ." Monkey finished for her, "Something we can't tell you about!"

Dogs
Each house we visited was also inhabited by three dogs: three little terrorists (wait, I mean, terriers) at the first and an australian shepherd and a couple of mid-sized mutts at the second. By the end of our first visit, the girls were finally starting to tell the dogs "No" and stand their ground (or at least keep moving) a little better. Bug even approached the dogs on her own and tried teaching them that they could lick her hands, but not her face. They fared much better with the bigger dogs at the second house, since those didn't bark as much or try to jump on them (herd them, yes, but that doesn't seem to bother the girls as much). Goose was brave enough to not only tell them no if necessary (particularly to Jojo, who seemed to regard a crumb-covered Goose as a walking snack bar), but even told me she was playing games with them when she was swinging her feet at the dogs nosing around her chair for dropped food.

Granddad's Office
Bug in particular has been interested in surgery and anesthesia lately, so one of the highlights of this trip was getting to visit the office of Granddad, a general surgeon. He has an operating room with a real operating table and the big lights and everything for in-office procedures. He showed them where everything was and how it worked and demonstrated the various positions for the operating table. He also had a Playmobil version of an operating room, which they had fun with as well.

Travelers
This trip involved a total of 20 non-consecutive hours of driving time. Overall, the entourage did beautifully. We had a few incidents of arguing/hitting/hair pulling, but once Bug got it through her head that she was allowed to physically defend herself when I couldn't adequately discipline from the driver's seat, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction seemed to kick in, and they left each other alone or at least played nicely. They watched more movies (Muppet's Christmas Carol, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Finding Nemo), listened to music, and had a blast playing with some of their new toys (little wooden family dolls, Playmobile people, and fairies were particularly popular in the car). And of course, they take full advantage of the fact that I allow additional treats for entertainment purposes when we're traveling.

(Note: Lots of pictures were taken over the holidays; however, none of them by me, which means I don't have any to post at this particular moment. Sorry!)