Little Biologists
This week the girls learned alot about the classification of species using details of physical characteristics. Earlier this week, we used the Dragonology book we acquired recently to identify the three toy dragons the girls have (a hydra, a wyvern, and a two-toed wyvern). Later in the week, we bought three new plastic dinosaurs, and of course we also had to identify them (a platasaur, a brachiosaur, and a utaraptor) using the dinosaur book and a little Googling. After spending so much time identifying and reading about these beasts, by the end of the week Monkey was making up her own: Her little plastic turtle, I have been informed, is a Red Dediemus turtle that lives in trees and eats rocks and sticks. His name is Huckle.

"Wax on. Wax off."
The entourage has entered a new era. Monkey and Bug started karate lessons this week. On Tuesday they went with Daddy to observe a kids class and get to see who their teacher would be. They were intrigued by the class, and Bug ventured as close to the action as she could--standing with her toes right up to the edge of the mat. They agreed with Daddy that they wanted to sign up for the introductory class (just them, two other kids, and their teacher going over the very basics of bowing in, coming to attention, etc.). They have to complete two intro classes to get their white belts and join one of the slightly larger regular classes. Despite the girls enthusiasm going in, the first class on Thursday did not go well and involved Monkey and Bug both refusing to speak to their teacher or follow her instructions. Once home they had a serious discussion with Daddy about respecting their teacher and the importance of participation. It ended with the girls agreeing to practice with Daddy or me everyday until their next class, so they would have a little more confidence going in next Tuesday. Once Daddy and Monkey got through an initial power struggle, the home practices have gone really well with Goose insisting on getting her own karate lesson too. Daddy and I have been really impressed with how well all three girls are learning the new motions.

Library Day
Storytime is back! This week's theme was moles, and in addition to hearing several cute stories about moles, the girls got to make mole puppets on popsicle sticks that poke their heads out of styrofoam cup holes. We came home with these books:
Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs
Little Bear
Red Bear's Fun with Shapes
Finn McCool and the Great Fish

While not library books, we also finished reading the abridged The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and continued reading from Where the Sidewalk Ends and making our way through the storybook version of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

Friendly Strangers
So, most kids reach "school age" and are given lessons in how dangerous strangers are and how one should never talk to strangers. Monkey and Bug, however, came into the world with an intense fear of strangers, and we recently decided it was time for them to join the civilized world and learn that most people are actually very nice and that they need to appropriately respond to friendly strangers saying hello. We had a discussion to that effect and read the story of Moses--because God can help them be brave enough to talk to, for example, their karate teacher just like He helped Moses be brave enough to go before Pharaoh (Moses had a sibling to back him up too!). We talked about how even our closest friends used to be strangers, and we also added "Be kind to friendly strangers" to the short list of rules that characterize "being a good shopper."

For Goose, the lone extrovert in the family, this isn't really an issue. At some point recently in prepping the big girls to encounter new people, Goose piped up with, "I like peoples!"

It's Summer Time!
It's officially summer: The pool is open, and we were in it! The water was still a bit chilly, but we had a great time. Remembering their hesitancy at the beginning of last summer, I wasn't sure what to expect from the girls, but they loved it! Monkey and Bug were happily kicking around the pool in their inner tubes right away, and they even ditched the tubes for awhile once Daddy showed them they had grown enough to touch the bottom of the shallow end without getting their faces in the water. Bug even jumped in all by herself with her tube on! Goose's favorite thing was being held under the arms while she paddled and kicked around the pool while yelling, "Swim! Swim!" or "Kick, kick, kick!" between occasional mouthfuls of pool water.

Reading, 'Rithmatic, and, um, History
Not quite the three R's but here's the rundown for the basic subject areas in our house:

Goose has been insisting on her own formal lessons almost every day this week. Mostly, we've been making the rounds of the posters we hung in the playroom a while back, so she's been going over the ABC's (she can sing the song), numbers 1-20 (she knows 1-10), colors (she probably knows half a dozen), and shapes (maybe 3 or 4).

Monkey has been really into learning new letter sounds this week: she formally added p, ch, and v, and we did a review session that involved a lot more than just the letter sounds that have been formally covered. One day this week Monkey asked if she could do extra reading instead of math, and I decided to go with it. We used a Sharpie and masking tape to label some of their wooden blocks with the appropriate shape names. Bug wanted in on this too, so they now each have a set of labeled shapes, and I've overheard them using those to teach Goose her shapes. Monkey also did a math worksheet this week that involved circling the appropriate numeral for the number of objects pictured. We also added a fun new math activity this week: fishbowl math. For Monkey, I filled the fishbowl with slips of paper on which I'd written numbers 1-20. She would blindly pick out a number, then count out the right number of objects from among her toys. This actually involved adding and subtracting skills because after the first number she never started from scratch; she simply added to or removed from the line up as needed.

Bug also enjoyed some fishbowl math; although her bowlful involved simple addition problems for sums up to 6. She pulled out the colored noodles to use as manipulatives, but only actually needed them for three problems. She also did pages in her math workbook: filling in numerals for addition sentences done in pictures and completing several pages of comparisons (circle the set that's greater, etc.). While reading lessons have definitely not been her favorite activity lately, she is still making progress. She added a new sound this week, b, and read a list or two of words and a brief story.

To start off our history studies this week, Bug requested that we make her a knight's helmet (Monkey's is too big for her), and the girls snuggled up with Daddy to look through a book he has about swords. We also read the section of the DK book about what jobs women had in Medieval times. I figured it was time to balance all the talk of knights and weapons, and real Medieval women certainly didn't spend all their time waiting around in fancy dresses to be rescued as the fairy tales would have you believe. Of course, the women of most interest to the girls were the wealthy landowners running large households. In particular they were intrigued by the concept of signet rings and wax seals on important papers and letters. We dug through my button jar to find a couple of fancy buttons (one of which actually does feature a design that looks like a coat of arms) and pulled out the playdough to experiment with creating our own seals. Bug even hung hers on a string and wore her signet necklace for several days this week.

History: Archery & Female Knights
After watching Robin Hood and Brave so recently, the girls were really interested in archery. They've been staging tournaments in the backyard using sticks for bows and arrows (since we're still working on acquiring an inexpensive kiddie bow, they've been cheerfully making due by throwing the smaller sticks at the target instead). We also pulled Daddy's wooden recurve bow and arrows out of the closet to examine and talked about how during Medieval times they used bows and arrows for tournaments, hunting, and fighting.

This week we also took the time to do a bit of online research and discovered that, while female knights were not exactly commonplace, they did exist! In fact, there were whole orders of them! We found a number of true stories online, and the girls were particularly interested in the Order of the Hatchet (composed of the women of Tortosa, Spain, who successfully defended their town against the Moors in the men's absence) and in the story of Agnes Hotot (who took her father's place in single combat when he fell too ill to compete himself--she won, of course). Monkey and Bug requested girl knight paper dolls (they remember the Ancient Roman paper dolls we made). Unfortunately, those don't exist and I'm not talented enough to draw them myself. However, we did find a decent knight paper doll who we altered to have long hair and simply declared him a girl for our purposes.

Lessons
With the excitement of Daddy coming home this week, we didn't do lessons everyday, but the ones we did went very well. Monkey completed a matching letter sounds puzzle (letter + picture + word) and officially added a new sound: o as in oak. We had a lot of fun with this one: Using the easel in the playroom, she and I made up a list of words that contain that sound and drew small pictures to go with them. For math this week, she and I (and Goose) played with patterns--taking turns getting each other to complete patterns with small colored blocks. Bug read through several lists of words and reviewed the sound she added at the end of last week: e as in egg. She continued working in her math book, completing some fill-in-the-number-sequence problems. Goose insisted on lessons too. At her request, we practiced recognizing her own name and sang several counting songs.

Into the Woods!
This Friday we attended a cook out for the officer's at Daddy's workplace that included a 4-mile hike. The girls had the option of staying at the house, but they were excited about the opportunity to explore new woods, and they completed the hike without complaint! (Well, Goose complained a little when I insisted on carrying her for awhile, so we wouldn't get left too far behind.) Each of the girls took a turn or two being carried by Daddy--mostly for the entertainment value of being up so high, though toward the end their little legs probably needed the rest too. Along the walk, in addition to all the plant life, we saw two different kinds of toads, two turtles, and a snake. Obviously, everyone had worked up a good appetite by the time we got to the potluck barbeque at the end. I was also pleased with the girls social skills--no one freaked out about all the unfamiliar faces, and Bug even carried on a conversation about the toads with an adult she didn't know previously.

Library Day: Summer Kick off!
Saturday was an unusual library day, since we didn't actually come home with any books. This weekend was the kick off for the summer reading program: Dig into Reading. There were outside activities--digging for treasure (gold spray painted rocks), planting seeds, creating chalk "cave paintings," along with cake to eat and a booth to sign up for the reading program itself. The girls have the whole summer to get me to read them 35 books (or 15 hours), but I'm guessing we'll reach that milestone in a matter of weeks. Though this isn't part of the official program I told Monkey and Bug we could put a star beside the title of every book they read themselves (or significantly help me to read) that way we can show the librarians what good readers they're getting to be. They were pretty excited about that prospect! We decided to wait until Monday to actually return and check out books--there were just too many people today.

We had a very busy, very exciting weekend! Once again, my entourage proved to be amazing travelers. On Friday we drove up to visit Nana and Papa Bear. The girls kept themselves busy with the toys they packed, some coloring sheets, listening to music, and watching Robin Hood, which they enjoyed but were a little put off by the fact that the characters were animals instead of people. We made great time and actually had a good part of the afternoon left by the time we arrived at our destination.

No visit with Nana is complete without some shopping and a trip to the amazing, huge used bookstore in their town. We came home with some great finds, including a condensed version of Howard Pyle's The Adventures of Merry Robin Hood (Bug was particularly pleased that he was properly human again). They were also very excited about a "book" I found that unfolded into a panoramic tour of a Medieval castle. The other highly popular purchase fell at the other end of the timeline--a Star Wars book that retells the Return of the Jedi and is illustrated with stills from the movie.

The real excitement of the day came right after lunch when we got to Skype with Daddy for the first time in two months! The girls showed off their new purchases and were just generally excited to have real time contact again. High fives and fist bumps were exchanged through the web cam.

That afternoon and evening, the girls got some quality time with Nana and Papa Bear. They explored the lakeshore out back and discussed, among many other things, which plants were edible. They went out to their favorite Japanese restaurant for dinner, then came home to watch the beginning of Brave before bedtime (Nana and Papa Bear hadn't seen it yet).

Sunday morning I woke up to a surprise in my email: Daddy was coming home early! The very next day! We cut our visit short, packed up, and headed home. The girls were SO excited. They wore their Team Daddy shirts to the airport and talked about their plans to give Daddy great big hugs when we picked him up and wrestle and watch Star Wars with him when we got home. At this point, all goals have been accomplished, and we're getting back into the routine again.

[Note: Tons of pictures were taken at Nana and Papa Bear's, but they're not yet available for posting. Keep an eye out for updates.]

Library Day
Another quiet library day . . . We came home with these books:
Mittens
Piglet and Granny
My Friend Rabbit
Little Blue Truck Leads the Way
The Night Eater
Our Tree Named Steve
Bear Feels Scared

Medieval Dinner and a Movie
On Monday this week, we read the pages in the Eyewitness book about Medieval food--what they ate, how they cooked it, what place settings were like, proper Medieval table etiquette, and how those differed between the classes. To top it off, we cooked a typical Medieval meal for us: boiled chicken, whose broth was used to make pottage (a vegetable soup thickened with grain) and which was served up on trenchers (thick slices of bread). I cheated, of course, with modern conveniences like boneless chicken, frozen veggies, and bread from the grocery store. Still, it was pretty tasty!

This week the girls asked if we could watch Sleeping Beauty again when I wasn't "wobbly," a pretty apt description of my state after my doctor's appointment last week. I agreed, and we not only watched the movie, but at the girls' request we also watched the first 30 minutes of the Making of Sleeping Beauty feature. I was skeptical about how interesting they would actually find this, but it was awesome! Most of those first 30 minutes were spent discussing how the background and animation style was inspired by Medieval art, illustrations, and tapestries. We got to see lots of the works the animators studied and comparisons to animation cels. The girls and I were fascinated.

While Sleeping Beauty is obviously a fairy tale, not history, the concepts of knights and royalty fit into a lot of their recent play. At some point though, they decided the traditional storyline just didn't work for them, so they've been changing it up using their dolls and stuffed animals. In one version I overheard, Briar Rose (the name they prefer because it's from the book, played by one of the Indian puppets) backed up by a small army of fairies confronts Maleficent (played by a stuffed pig with wings) and proclaims, "Ha! Your magic's not strong enough to make me fall asleep!" In the ensuing battle, Maleficent apparently starts flinging magic around. Some of it misses Briar Rose and hits Prince Philip (one of the teddy bears) instead. This princess has no time to pause for a gentle romantic kiss to awaken him, however; instead she grabs her "brother" (the girls seem confused about this since romantic love obviously hasn't entered their worldviews yet) and yells, "Hey, Philip! Wake up! Wake up!" He wakes up, and obviously Maleficient doesn't stand a chance against this duo.

We also studied a person from actual Medieval history this week: Joan of Arc. I had several Joan of Arc coloring sheets for them to work on while I read a short biography I found online. I confess, however, that I chose to focus on what she accomplished in life rather than the circumstances of her death--they'll learn that tidbit soon enough. The idea of a female warrior was just as intriguing to them as I thought it would be. Now at their request I need to do some research about any female knights.

Lessons
For Monkey's reading lessons this week, we read the Animal Encyclopedia entry about bears (with a combination of repetition  sounding out, and sight reading), and she did several coloring pages of familiar nursery rhymes that included the rhyme written out. I wasn't sure how much she was really reading and how much she was reciting, but when I asked her to point to particular words in the rhyme, she could accurately find them. Goose wanted in on the nursery rhyme reading lesson, so I printed up "Humpty Dumpty" for her. She almost has that one memorized.

Monkey tackled a connect-the-dots page for one of her reading lessons and did measuring for the others. One day her sisters decided to join her; Monkey manned the yardstick, Goose grabbed a ruler, and Bug tracked down a measuring tape. They measured tons of items in the playroom. I was impressed that Goose accurately measured a few one and two inch things, and I introduced Monkey and Bug to the concept of "so many and a half inches." They really seemed to enjoy being able to measure more specifically.

This week Bug celebrated reaching page 200 in her reading book! She's reading more word lists and stories with no dots, too. She also added the sound e as in egg. She really loves her math lessons though. She did a connect-the-dots page, a fill-in-the-number-sequence page (i.e., 1, _, 3), a few search and find pages that asked her to circle the appropriate number in the chart, and half a dozen comparison pages (i.e., circle the biggest items, cross out the lightest items, etc.).

Birthday Party!
This past Saturday we wished our friend A a happy 3rd birthday by joining her and lots of other friends at a bouncy house gym. Fortunately, we were among the first people to arrive, so the girls were able to start exploring before it got too crowded and noisy. Monkey and Bug quickly joined their friend LA in doing infinite laps up and down the slide. Their favorite feature though was probably the obstacle course. Goose, somewhat surprisingly, decided she was intimidated by the big bouncy stuff and stuck to climbing around the foamy baby/toddler area. It did eventually get to be overstimulating for Bug, but she found a good coping mechanism: every 15 minutes or so she'd run to me to be picked up and bury her face in my shoulder for a few moments before returning to play. She and Monkey also figured out that the rest of the kids tended to travel in small herds, which meant there was almost always a bouncy house with no occupants that they could have to themselves for at least a little while.

Library Day
Another quiet day at the library. We actually kept most of our books from last week because either we hadn't finished reading them or they were so good that we wanted to have them to read for another week. I might have skipped the library visit entirely, except that we needed to return a movie, and of course, we can hardly visit the library without getting more books! We added these to our stack this week:
Dancing Harriet
Peep!
Fancy Nancy Explorer Extraordinaire (she goes backyard exploring mostly to find and observe bugs)
Eats

Lessons
Monkey and Bug have firmly established their preferences for having individual reading and math lessons (so much for my idea that having twins would make things simpler by requiring less lesson planning). Monkey likes to do hers first thing in the morning when she's fresh, and she's a very hands-on learner who requires that all lessons have significance beyond just improving her skills (real books, not word lists, for reading; and lots of manipulatives for math). Bug prefers her lessons immediately after quiet time when Goose is (hopefully) still sleeping and Monkey is still engrossed in whatever her quiet time activity was. She likes her lessons to follow an orderly sequence and is motivated by seeing how far she's come and what fun/challenging activities are coming up next (she's a textbook and worksheet girl at this point).

Monkey likes to have lots of input into what the day's lessons will be (which means sometimes I just wing it, and sometimes I manage to have a stockpile of options for her to choose from). During her reading lessons this week, she wanted to: learn how to spell/read food words (we made a number of new entries in her word book), learn more about giraffes and human anatomy (we read an entry in the Animal Encyclopedea and several entries in a kids' body book by repetition), and write a story about knights (she dictated a story about a knight who fell off his horse in a joust but got up again to keep fighting; I wrote it down in her composition book for her trace over the letters). For her math lessons, measuring things is definitely her favorite activity, so we did that a lot this week. The yardstick certainly seems to serve as a more meaningful number line, and she's been working on recognizing numerals on sight (instead of having to count up to the number to tell me what it is). We also played what I call 20 card pick-up: I toss notecards with numbers 1-20 written on them out onto the living room floor, and she puts them back in the right order, a task she can complete now with minimal assistance. On the day she was interested in food words, we also found a math worksheet she wanted to do that involved counting up the different foods pictured and recording the total using tally marks.

Bug continues to cheerfully follow the textbook for reading and her math workbook. She's now just over halfway through the reading book, and she read lots of individual words and an entire story without dots under individual sounds! This was a huge triumph. At first she didn't think she'd be up for reading the whole story, and we agreed upon a stopping point about halfway through. However, once we got to that point, she just couldn't bear the suspense of unanswered questions and ended up finishing it anyway. She didn't add any new sounds this week, but she asked for coloring sheets to review sounds she had learned recently. She usually does two or three math worksheets every day (I require one, but she's usually having too much fun to stop, and I'm not going to make her quit!). She's been improving her writing of numerals, but occasionally has to refer back to previous pages to review how to do them. Search-and-find pages continue to be her favorite pages, and she usually has me add more blanks for objects the book didn't actually ask her to count. She encountered a new kind of worksheet this week that listed a number alongside a row of a few objects with instructions to draw in however many more of the objects were needed. She was intimidated by the drawing part, so I offered to do that for her if she told me how many (we had a good laugh at some of my misshapen fruits; I'm hoping that will give her confidence to try herself next time, if even I can't draw them perfectly). She was struggling with the math concept, but I showed her how to solve it using a number line. She understood immediately and did a great job. 

Knights in Shining Armor
We did remember to look at the stained glass windows at church on Sunday, and the girls had great fun dashing from one window to the next trying to figure out what story was being depicted.

We finally cracked open The Knight's Handbook this week, and we read about arms and armor, tournaments, heraldry, the defensive architecture of castles (walls, towers, moats, etc.), and things knights did when they weren't fighting (dancing, hunting, playing games). We haven't finished the book, but we covered a lot this week! To accompany the reading, we watched the tournament clips from A Knight's Tale (hardly a historically accurate film, I know, but we own it, and it gave the girls a much better understanding of jousting and heraldry), turned their Roman shields into Medieval shields by cutting them down and creating the girls' own heraldic signs, made a helmet out of posterboard, and dug through the toy bins for all the knights and their accessories (we have a lot more than I remembered, and they managed to enact whole battles--although we ran out of horses, so they had to travel to battlefields in Safari jeeps and a trailer pulled by a rhinoceros instead).

My knights with their heraldic shields: (l to r) Goose with a monkey, Bug with a zebra, and  Monkey with a Jaguar.

I tried to get a photo of Monkey arrayed in this helmet, her shield, and a Boomwhacker lance atop the rocking horse.
Unfortunatley, she wasn't up for photos, but I did get this shot of her helping Goose get the helmet on straight.

At Bug's insistence we also talked about Medieval books (she had spotted the new craft supplies required for the hands-on fun to go with that study). Thanks to the Eyewitness book and an art history book we happen to have on our shelves, we were able to pore over images of the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and an assortment of illuminated pages. Then we broke out the markers, adhesive "jewels," posterboard, and illuminated coloring pages to create our own gorgeous reproductions. The girls decided people ought to start making such fancy books again.

Monkey engrossed in her fancy Medieval book and a close-up of the cover Bug created.

For a special Saturday morning breakfast, we decided to try a recipe from The Knight's Handbook for honeyed toast (diced toast topped with a syrup of honey, cinnamon, ginger, and pepper and sprinkled with chopped nuts). Yum!

Friends! Pizza! Movie!
One day this week I had to go to the doctor to have an in-office procedure done. Since this involved my arriving at the office already mildly sedated and returning home still loopy, I am very thankful for wonderful friends and neighbors! The girls had a blast: They got to join their best friends for an all-afternoon playdate that migrated from their friend's house across the street back to ours, while one of the other moms drove me. Then when I got home, we ordered pizza and had a picnic dinner in the living room while watching Disney's Sleeping Beauty (We checked out a non-Disney version of the story from the library awhile back, which they loved. A comparative analysis of the stories followed, of course.)

Et Cetera
Monkey and Bug made the exciting discovery (with minimal instruction) that they were capable of making toast all by themselves! Obviously, we ate lots of toast for breakfast this week. Bug pitched in to help make dinner several evenings this week, and she informed me at some point that she thought when she was 10 she would be able to make a whole meal all by herself--at least an easy meal.

I also taught the girls our address this week: less in order to have them memorize it and more as an easily accessible way to straighten out the differences between cities, states, and countries that they've been struggling with. Bug decided she wanted to actually mail a letter this week, so we also experienced that process and discussed what important things/information needed to be on the envelope.

The girls started growing things this week! Monkey and Bug have strawberry kits, and Goose picked
cilantro. The cilantro grows fast, but we could just seed the strawberry plants starting to peek out of the soil by the end of the week.