DADDY'S HOME!
We found out on somewhat short notice that Daddy was coming home early from his big trip! Family tradition is that we always pick him up from the airport with the entourage wearing shirts that say "Team Daddy." They've all recently outgrown theirs, and Monkey and Bug were extremely excited that they could write TEAM DADDY on their new shirts themselves (with carefully supervised fabric Sharpie markers). Of course, in the excitement of his arrival no pictures were taken, so you'll just have to wait to see the finished products. As soon as we got home, the girls insisted that Daddy open his much-belated Christmas presents, and Daddy revealed the presents he brought home from some of his stops--some edible treats, a picture book with a stuffed animal, and key chains. This week has involved lots of showing Daddy all the toys they got for Christmas, wrestling, playing with puzzles, playing hide-and-seek and follow-the-leader, snuggling, getting him to really read them bedtime stories instead of watching the videos he made, etc.

Reading
Bug is now reading paragraphs of three sentences and continues finding more and more words in real books that she realizes she can read. She was very excited about showing off her reading skills for Daddy by reading two Bob books to him in their entirety. I've also heard her watching phonics videos on Starfall, and she usually gets involved in the reading activities I have planned for Monkey.

Monkey formally added a new sound this week, n, which opens up a lot of word possibilities. She discovered (and spent a great deal of time on) a bunch of sight reading games on Starfall, so I focused more of our lessons time on phonics skills this week. We tried two new activities this week that really appeal to her kinesthetic sense: I poured about two cups of dry rice into a tray, and we practiced writing out all the sounds she knows as well as a few short words (then of course, I gave her some time to just play with the rice, which was highly popular, and that's when Bug and Goose were allowed to jump in). I also pulled out the alphabet blocks we got when they were babies and had Monkey sort out all the sounds she knows already. Next I started building short words and helping her sound them out. The final part of the lesson was hilarious and highly effective. I gave Monkey freedom to build whatever word she wanted, and I would sound it out. Of course, it was all nonsense, but it really enforced the idea that you can read words you don't know by sight by sounding them out. During the next day's lesson, she actually sounded out several entirely new words all by herself!

Both girls have been actively memorizing things this week: short books that I've been reading, nursery rhymes from me and from Starfall, and songs from CDs in the car. Goose has been picking up on the nursery rhymes at least; her favorites are I'm a Little Teapot and Humpty Dumpty, though we tend to get slightly (adorably) garbled and abridged versions at this point.

Math
We've been working on really getting the teens in the right order and completing simple addition problems (sums less than 5) this week. I made a set of flashcards for numbers 1-20 awhile back, and this week I flung them out 52-card pickup style and had the girls line them up in the right order. They completed the task with minimal help (mostly me reminding them that "teen" means "10 plus" however many and asking what should come next if ___teen was last?). We also pulled out a numbers puzzle game that has them putting together three-piece mini puzzles of the numeral, the number word, and an illustration of that many objects. We used the white board to do addition problems. At this point I use an appropriate number of circles instead of actual numerals, then I write out the "real" equation once they solve the problem. At the end of this week, Bug actually requested some subtraction problems because they've come up in Starfall.

Library Day
This week's theme at storytime was boats--lots of fun books and a singing of "A Sailor Went to Sea, Sea, Sea." The craft was making a boat on a popsicle stick with shapes cut out from scrapbooking paper. Monkey and Bug did nicely with theirs, and Goose as usual insisted that on doing it "all by myself!" The girls ended up sitting separately at the big craft tables, and when I went to check on Goose as the end, she held up her creation, looking a bit uncertain, "Um, Mommy, it's not a boat." While she did manage to get all the paper glued onto the popsicle stick, I had to agree with her assessment and asked if she wanted any help. She agreed, and I did actually manage to peel off the paper and help her start over with much success. This week we came home with these books:
Rhyming Dust Bunnies
Let's Say Hi to Friends Who Fly!
Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog
The Little House
The Pirate of Kindergarten
Baby Animals

Exploring
When Thursday, our usual homeschool group day, rolled around, Monkey immediately declared that she didn't want to go anywhere, and Goose insisted that we should go to a playground. Since we had no responsibilities with the group that day, I went with it and we headed to a nearby park instead. Once we arrived, it occurred to me that the frisbee golf trails through the woods would be deserted on a weekday morning, and the entourage was thrilled at the suggestion that we go exploring instead. We found sweet gum tree balls, some impressive samples of quartz, and several pieces of trash (which we dutifully carried with us back to the trashcan). We reached the very top of a HUGE hill (at least the entourage's perspective), discovered a set of tennis courts we'd never seen before, climbed the very steep but short hill surrounding the baseball fields and slid down it (repeatedly), crossed a wooden bridge over a mostly dry ditch and decided it would be perfect for enacting The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and then decided to find a good spot for a bear's house in the woods and play Goldilocks and the Three Bears (we didn't actually act out this story; we pretended to be the three bears going for their walk in the woods while the porridge cooled--much more fun than pretending to complain about what they found when they returned).

Family Class at the Y!
The Y we're members of has a once-a-week class open to kids and parents. Monkey, Bug, and I have actually gone twice before (Goose is too little), but I believe I forgot to write about it before. The first time was an epic failure. Some friends talked us into joining them, but it turned out to be a family Zumba class--the music was way too loud and the instructor far too excited for Monkey and Bug to tolerate. We left the room after only a few minutes when Monkey burst into tears, but Bug wanted to watch from the hallway for awhile. I talked to the Y staff, and we tried again for Family Fun & Games Night. While the girls didn't want to participate in everything, overall we had a great time, and they were really excited that we could bring Daddy with us this week. They are still hesitant participants, and Monkey is still trying to grasp the concept of competition, but they get into it eventually, and I think being in a semi-organized class and watching Daddy and I follow instructions from a teacher too will be a good learning experience for them.

Grandma & Granddad's House!
We got to have a lovely long weekend with Grandma, Granddad, and Uncle N this week! We arrived Friday evening and went to straight to Uncle N's school to watch him play his trumpet in the pep band for a girl's basketball team. The entourage has played with basketballs before, but they've never seen anyone actually play the game. I explained the very basics of the rules, and Monkey and Bug watched for a little while, but Goose was just enthralled. She even stood up on the top bleacher to get a better view. Hearing the band play a few times was definitely the highlight; although Monkey did cover her ears until she adjusted to the noise level.

Saturday morning we went to the local science center. The temporary exhibit was perfect--all about the passage of time, a topic the girls and I have been discussing recently. Many of the stations were over their heads, but they learned about how things and people change when they get older, the seasons, how plants grow and move, and larger scale things like continental drift. They got to watch some time lapse photography and create some slow motion videos to watch water splashing and little plastic balls bouncing around. Revisiting the permanent exhibit was fun too because Monkey and Bug were much more able to do and understand things this time around. The center has a moving model of the orbits of the sun, moon, and earth, which the entourage found particularly interesting. Monkey and Bug were also able to form hypotheses about the exhibits with balls on ramps and had a great time repeating the experiment to see if it worked every time. They played in the preschool section for a while too before we left, which Goose loved--massive Legos, puppets, costumes, etc. Goose spent a long time wearing a frog hoodie, holding a frog puppet, and jumping around saying, "Ribbit! Ribbit!" 

That afternoon we went for a walk to see Grandma and Granddad's new pond and take a short hike through the woods. Highlights were finding a HUGE oak leaf, seeing a pair of mallard ducks on the river, digging up some mole hills, and spotting three big, beautiful goldfish in the pond (one of whom ate a "live, still jiggling worm" while we were watching). I didn't bring my camera, so the Monkey and Bug took the opportunity to draw pictures of their favorites parts in our nature journal and dictate a brief description for me to write. 

Sunday meant church in the morning and lots of time to play with family in the afternoon. Monday we had a successful trip to a used bookstore. (I've been wanting more big, colorful non-fiction books for our home library, and we came away with some great finds.) We also made Valentines! Grandma had quite a collection of doilies, paper, stickers, etc. assembled, and they made some great ones for our neighborhood friends and one for Daddy that he'll just have to get belatedly. Tuesday was spent driving home, and I have some great little travellers!

Library Day
The storytime theme this week was books by Audrey Wood (such a fun author!). We even watched a "book on video" of The Napping House, always a favorite. The craft was completely unrelated: The girls made Valentines by gluing bits of torn construction paper to fill in a heart shape with the caption "I love you to pieces." Somewhat uncharacteristically it was Monkey who really got into this and methodically covered every spot of the heart. Bug and Goose got distracted by friends who attended storytime this week and went across the room to socialize instead. We came home with these books:
Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
Billy and Blaze
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
Volcanoes
Anno's Counting Book
5 Busy Ducklings

Reading
Bug has officially added the sounds l, w, and u as in fun to her repertoire, but she's also discovering that she does actually know additional letter sounds. She's very quickly gaining fluency and doesn't have to slowly sound out every word before reading it quickly. I even dug up some hand-me-down phonics readers, which she's been perusing and sorting out which ones she can actually read already. She actually sat me down and read a little 10-page booklet with assistance only for the sounds she hadn't been taught yet.

Monkey continues to love the new methods for her lessons. She's officially added o as in otter, and she's used the coloring/tracing sheets to review some of the letters she already knows. We've also done a couple of sight reading exercises in which we picked out a couple of key words that she read throughout the chosen storybook. One evening while we were getting ready for bed, she had one of the books to herself and was going through the title saying each word and then sounding it out slowly and pointing, noting which letter made which sound in the word. She even pointed out to me which letters were also in hers, Bug's, and Goose's names. Basically, she's learning phonics backwards. 

Math
The favorite math "activity" this week was Anno's Counting Book, a beautifully illustrated book that watches a village grow through the seasons. Each spread features a different number 1-12, and the girls had a great time finding all the items of the appropriate number for the page. I also made Bug and Monkey each a "counting page," a 100-block grid with enough space in each square for a small manipulative (so far at their request we've used Cheerios and Frosted Flakes--we're very into edible math). I've used them to practice counting and review the concept of ones and tens. I think place value has actually clicked for them, and they're definitely getting better at counting to 20 accurately. Bug continues to help Goose count to 10, of course.

Math lesson completed, what happened next was very typical of them: Bug continued meticulously placing Cheerios in boxes, while Monkey crunched up a fist of flakes and said, "Look, Mommy! It's like snow!"

We also decided to do a measuring session this week. This time I took out a sheet of paper to record our findings, which the girls loved. They got to practice identifying numbers, then comparing them at the end when I had them look at our list and tell me which items were smallest and biggest and which two items were the same length.

Color Experiment
We bought a new set of tempera paints and a couple of cheap plastic palettes at Walmart this week, and one morning Bug and Monkey sat down to do what they called a "color experiment." I gave them each blobs of the primary colors and explained that using these they could they could make any color they wanted. They spent a good while just mixing paints before I pulled out the paper. I gave Goose a piece of paper and just one color at a time, and her big sisters got the task of "teaching Goose" about colors by listing everything they could think of that was usually whatever color she was currently painting with.

Library Day
Showing up at the library was particularly exciting this week since three of the girls' neighborhood friends (and their moms, of course) were also attending. The theme for storytime this week was colors and featured two of our favorite books: Pete the Cat and Three White Mice. The craft was also popular: The girls each wrote their name on a piece of construction paper (well, Monkey wrote the shortened version of her name and Goose just scribbled, but she insisted on doing it herself). Then they covered over the markered letters with foamy shape stickers in a variety of colors. We came home with these books:
Little Mouse's First Valentine
Hansel and Gretel
Katie Loves the Kittens
5 Busy Ducks (Milestone: This is the first time Goose picked out a book to take home!)
Giraffes Can't Dance
My Dinosaur

Experiments in Reading Lessons
While the new time for Monkey's reading lessons did seem to help, she still seemed to have come to a standstill and was getting farther and farther behind Bug--a source of much frustration for her. It occurred to me (finally!) that one of the reasons we wanted to homeschool in the first place was so we could tailor each kid's education to their own learning styles and interests. So why exactly was I making Monkey persist in this program that wasn't working for her? I sat down and really thought through Monkey's personality and preferences related to learning, and realized it should have come as no surprise that what worked for analytical, left-brained Bug wasn't going to cut it for kinesthetic, right-brained Monkey.

I did some online research about right-brained learners and came up with a new plan and new expectations. I am not abandoning the book outright because I like how it presents concepts and I really feel phonics-based reading is important. However, we're making the following adjustments: Every new sound will be introduced with coloring and tracing sheets from this awesome website (First School). We already tried this out with much success by using a half dozen sheets over a couple of days to review a sound she's been struggling to remember. I have abandoned the tasks of getting her to read seemingly random lists of words, which she always rebelled against ("I want sentences, Mommy!" That desire lines up exactly to everything I read about right-brained learners seeking significance in everything. Bug on the other hand is highly motivated by seeing how many she can read all by herself and could care less what they mean.). We have kept the tasks for reading rhyming words and sentences made from sounds that have already been introduced, but now instead of just reading them out of the book, she can trace them while she reads them thanks to handwriting sheets I've creating using this website (HandWritingWorksheets.com/). I've also added two new activities (note that I just pick a couple of activities for each days lesson). I made both Monkey and Bug Word Books, a blank book with the pages labelled alphabetically. Whenever they think of a word they can or want to be able to read, they write it in the book under the appropriate initial letter, asking for help with spelling as necessary. They love these books! Monkey wanted to watch me write the first few words she thought of, but then she took over because it just looked like so much fun. Zoe even managed to piece together how to spell words that involved sounds that she hasn't formally learned in lessons yet.The other activity is just a Monkey thing, but Bug listened too. I had Monkey pick out a book she wanted to know and told her I'd help her learn it. I had anticipating endless rereadings of some sing-songy book, but that wasn't at all what she had in mind. She picked out a Richard Scarry's book and had me read a phrase at a time while underlining each word with my finger, then she repeated the phrase underlining the words with her finger. She LOVED this. I figure either she'll gradually figure out the patterns of reading with the help of the phonics-based worksheets I'm having her do, or she'll just eventually memorize by sight every word in the English language. Either way, she's now excited about her lessons and she will eventually be reading on her own!

Bug is still cheerfully plugging away at the book and really gaining fluency quickly. She's also starting to pick out words in ordinary books that she realizes she can read all by herself! Very exciting!

Math
The girls continue to spend lots of time playing Starfall math. I've seen them playing games involving counting (both focused on the teens and counting to 100), greater than/less than problems, and addition and subtraction equations. We played with our own hands-on manipulatives too, of course. Bug pulled out the yardstick at some point and spent a good amount of time collecting objects to measure and finding particular joy in discovering items of the same length. The favorite activity this week--repeated a couple of times--was marshmallow math. I made two different worksheets with four addition problems on each page, involving numbers 1-5. Thanks to Starfall they know what + and = mean, so I didn't actually have to teach that. Each numeral was in a box, and I had them fill in the appropriate number of marshmallows and figure out how many went in what Bug called the "Secret Box" after the equal sign. When they finished their sheet, they could eat a few marshmallows, of course.

Goose's Lessons
I don't do formal lessons with Goose--she's only just 2 after all. However, Monkey and Bug have taken it upon themselves. Bug usually teaches her math and recently informed me that Goose is getting better at counting to 10, but she still needs to work on it. Monkey has been teaching her nursery rhymes by sitting on the couch with the book and "reading" to her, having Goose repeat them after her one word at a time, and acting them out for her. They've both been teaching her what different objects are made of and which ones she has to be careful with.

Coloring
They've all been doing lots of coloring recently. Some coloring book pages, but mostly just blank paper--really, I think we may have gone through close to half a ream of paper. I'm surprised our markers haven't gone dry yet! Goose's still look mostly like scribbling, but sometimes she tells me what she's drawing and she frequently does pre-writing scribbling--a series of very small lines and loops across a page. Monkey and Bug are both getting significantly better at drawing recognizable, more detailed images.

Nana's Here!

Nana came to visit for the first part of the week. She helped the girls put together a celebration of my birthday, so they got to go shopping for my birthday presents (Nana let them buy the chocolates and the decorative stepping stone, but vetoed the two-foot-tall ceramic bunny.) They also helped her bake a birthday cake, and it turned out beautifully and delicious! The cake was Bug's idea. At her request Nana found a recipe for "a chocolate cake--one of those round ones with a hole in the middle--with smashed candy canes on top."

The cake in progress . . . and the tasty finished product!

Nana also helped us do a little redecorating in the playroom. Grandma and Granddad had given us a set of books for Christmas that we discovered had wonderful posters in them--colors, shapes, numbers 1-20, and the alphabet. Nana helped us find frames and choose spots to hang them, low enough for the girls to actually enjoy them. We also came home with a little round flower mirror that we hung by the dress up clothes drawer. Goose has spent a fair amount of time on top of the dress up drawer making faces at herself. I have yet to succeed in capturing the cuteness on camera though.

Monkey and Goose admiring a couple of the posters before we hung them.

One evening, I took myself out for dinner and a movie, and the girls had their own dinner and a movie with Nana. They watched the Shirley Temple version of Heidi, which they loved, and of course had to compare to the book and the other version we've watched.

Reading

Monkey's been struggling with reading lessons this week, but at the end of the week, I think I found several things that help: changing the time for her lesson to the morning instead of right after nap time, keeping Bug's lesson after naptime so they're not back-to-back and can't compare themselves as readily, and giving her an encouraging pep talk (pointing out that most 4 year olds aren't learning to read and that there are things that she learns really fast that Bug had to struggle with for a while). We've been focusing on the dozen sounds she knows and on building her sounding out skills.

Bug is really mastering sounding out, and I rarely need to help her anymore. She's been reading a couple of sentences or a list of 6-9 words everyday. By the end of the week she read the first BOB Book all by herself! She's known the sounds involved for awhile now, but this is the first time she's had the confidence to tackle it. She was screaming with excitement when she finished, and she immediately searched out more BOB Books to read. She couldn't actually read every word in the ones she found (I need to dig them all out of the bookshelves again), but she had a blast finding words she could read and even pieced together some words that she didn't know all the sounds of based on context.

Goose can frequently be found on the living room floor all tucked in to "read" a pile of good books.

Math

We've been doing more organized math activities this week. One morning we watched an episode of Blue's Clues that happened to be about recording information with charts. I offered to help the girls make their own, and they excitedly cataloged a wagon load of blocks based on shape and a slew of different objects based on color (blocks, playdough, magnets). Bug and I used dried beans and number note cards to work on understanding the teens (first we lined up 10 beans, then added the appropriate number of beans for each card; Bug's counting skills noticeably improved after this). Monkey wanted to review 1-10 before attempting the teens, so I drew 10-block grids on a couple sheets of paper, labeled each with a number, and had them count out the appropriate number of beans in each block. It's amazing how much fun they had with such a simple activity. By far the favorite math activity of the week was actually working through the M&Ms Count to One Hundred book. This involved counting out 20 M&Ms in 5 different colors, then counting all the way to 100, when they were finally allowed to actually eat a handful of M&Ms.

Making charts . . . Counting beans . . . Playing Starfall.com math games at the upstairs workstation

Library Day

Storytime is back! The theme for this first week back was winter and snow days. Funny, considering she was reading to a shorts-wearing crowd enjoying some unseasonably warm weather. We came home with these books:

Hi, Cat!

I'm Getting a Checkup

No Roses for Harry

Jimmy's Boa and the Bungee Jump Slam Dunk

Red Green Blue: A first book of colors (This book introduces colors using nursery rhyme characters, and includes additional nursery rhyme scenes in the background. The girls and I had a great time finding them all and either quoting or looking up the original rhymes.)

The M&Ms Count to One Hundred

Train of Thought

It's amazing what learning can happen when you're simply willing to follow a kid's train of thought. A tidbit about a "hidden city" (Pompeii), in a non-fiction book they like has led to some great discussions. We discussed archeology, of course, and how the city was buried a long, LONG time ago, but archeologist found it and dug it up. We looked up pictures online. They noticed that the roads looked different (narrow, cobblestones), and we talked about how cars hadn't even been invented when people lived in this city. I think they are finally beginning to get a sense of "a long time ago." They were particularly fascinated by the petrified corpses which led to questions about the nature of death and the soul (the body stays on earth, but we believe the soul--the part of you that thinks and prays--goes to heaven after death), and even got a bit into the theology of salvation (because they wanted to know why/how we get to heaven). Another very different direction the discussion took was an interest in volcanoes. We looked up a section about volcanoes in another book in the Ask Me! series, watched a 20 minute Bill Nye episode about them, looked up photos of additional volcanoes online, and created our own classic baking soda and vinegar volcano. Monkey came up with her own activity and got her sisters to join her in pretending to be lava, exploding out of the volcano tunnel, and spreading out to become new land (this involved taking running leaps off the end of couch and landing to spread themselves out across the floor).