Library Day
This week's storytime had a birthday theme complete with real cupcakes to snack on at the end. We listened to several fun birthday stories, then made cards decorated with cupcakes out of tissue paper. Several of our favorite friends were there this week, so we hung out for a long time afterward, and came home with tons of books:
The Yo-yo Man
The Happy Hedgehog
Now and Ben (a neat picture book about how Ben Franklin's inventions effect our lives today)
Alphabet under Construction
An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball
Waking Dragons
Buzz!
The Island of the Skog
Prehistoric Pinkerton
The First Strawberries
Chief Crazy Horse
Black Elk
The Talking Leaves: The Story of Sequoyah
The Mystic Horse

Yellow Belts!
Monkey and Bug passed their third strike test on Thursday, and on Saturday we attended a graduation ceremony where they received their yellow belts! The graduation is a really big deal: it involved their being willing to be up on stage in front of an audience of a couple hundred people and join their classmates in showing off some of their skills before being given their belts. Their class demonstrated a strike drill (jab, cross, uppercut, hook punch), kick walking across the stage, and swinging their nunchucks while walking across the stage (that's hard enough to do while stationary!). Like the rest of their class, Monkey demonstrated a very nice figure eight with her nunchucks. Bug, however, has been struggling with figure eights and decided she would do something she knew she was good at instead. At the last minute backstage and without any adult involvement as far as I know, she decided to do her own thing (propeller spin, over the shoulder, around the back, repeat). I just really impressed that didn't freak out when asked to do something she wasn't confident with!

Monkey and Bug (far left) participating in a school tradition
of kneeling to wipe some sweat on their brand new belts.

 

Bug is SO proud of her new belt!

Lessons (Plus One)
Lessons continue. Monkey and Bug are both making progress with their reading. Monkey can now figure out most words with only one slow sounding out. Bug made a major breakthrough this week: she realized she could sound out words in her head and read everything the fast way out loud! They really finished the math concepts workbooks this week, and Monkey started on her addition book in earnest. I made a stack of flash cards this week for addition problems using all the single digit combinations. Bug's been working her way through that stack. We sorted out which ones she just knows, and she used Cheerios for counters one day to figure out some of the others. She continues working out multiplication spontaneously on her own by asking questions.

Thursday's lessons were made more exciting with an additional member of the entourage: the girls' best friend LA (a homeschooling 3-year-old who lives next door) spent most of the day with us, so her mom could get some serious work done for her at-home business. The girls had a blast. I did regular individual lessons for the big girls first while Goose and LA played. Then we dug up the sidewalk chalk and all went outside for a handwriting lesson for everybody (well, Goose just scribbled). LA's letter of the week was E, so they all focused on that and helped LA come up with a long list words that start with the letter E. Of course, that evolved into just playing outside and my girls helped LA conquer the climbing dome! Then everybody listened in on Goose's lessons: an alphabet book and a fairy-themed counting book, An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball. The latter inspired them to create their own version of the butterfly ball complete with costumes, dancing, and a plastic food banquet.

Happy little homeschoolers!

The beginning of the alphabet Bug was working on outside

Stories of the Plains
We read more picture book biographies and folktales this week, most of which involved the plains tribes: Black Elk, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Sequoyah for the biographies and The Mystic Horse and The First Strawberries for the folktales. For some of these readings we decided to pretend to be Native Americans and sit in our "teepee" (beach tent) in the backyard to hear the stories. The girls are fascinated by teepees because of the decorations and their mobility, so on Friday we decided to make miniature ones the right size for their Playmobil figures. We gathered sticks from the woods near our house, and the girls colored pictures on "buffalo skins" (cutouts from paper bags). Bug got frustrated with the instability of the teepees and decided to move her Playmobil to "pueblos" (the Playmobil police station). Monkey however had quite the camp set up.

The very latest in household fashion: paper bag hats!

Lessons

Formal lessons continue as usual! I don't have any big news to share, but here's what those actually look like just in case you were wondering: Lessons time is about an hour and half to two hours right after the girls eat breakfast and get ready for the day. I snuggle up with each girl individually for reading lessons while the other two play (Monkey and Bug work through their assignment for the day from our textbook, and Goose and I have been reading ABC books). This is the most challenging lesson of the day for Monkey and Bug, so we take a "brain break" before jumping into math--I set a timer and we dance to music, take a walk, or they just have a few minutes to play and relax.

Next Monkey and Bug usually do math simultaneously, though they rarely work on the same thing; I sit between them at our table in the study and help when necessary to read directions or point out what needs to be corrected. They've both almost finished their workbooks for numbers and math concepts, and they've both done pages from their addition book (the concepts books also involves addition). Bug has worked on subtraction, but Monkey decided she wasn't quite ready to go there yet. Goose will either color (sometimes they're even number coloring sheets) or listen to me or her sisters read a counting book. (Unrelated to lessons, Bug continues excitedly discovering multiplication. This morning she was sorting out the "times 10s" and "times 2s" and was explaining to me that "two 10s is 20, three 10s is 30, four 10s is . . . " and on up to 100, while "three 2s is 6, four 2s is 8, and five 2s is 10. [long pause] How many 2s would I need to make 100?")

Finally, the girls work on handwriting--once again simultaneously but not usually the same thing. At this point I let them pick their own letters to work on and medium in which to do it (workbook, dry erase book, coloring sheet, markers, crayons, paints, etc.).

After that we jump into our less formal lessons (history, science) or chores if it's a stay-at-home day or head off on our outing for the day (library, Y, shopping, homeschool group, etc.). At the moment my goal is to do formal lessons four days a week: Saturday is Daddy's stay-at-home day, Sunday is for church and resting, and we usually have one day during the week that just gets shot for whatever reason (appointments, field trip, etc.).

History
We're still having lots of fun with everybody's favorite subject. The girls recently saw a preview for Disney's Brother Bear, recognized that it was about Native Americans and decided we should watch that for one of our history lessons. I agreed, so we checked it out from the library and ordered pizza. There were some scary moments, but they loved it, and they were definitely paying attention to details like the kind of clothes they wore, weapons they carried, and things like kayaks. We also did our usual separating fact from fiction (for example, people don't really turn into animals--either while living or after death).

We read the true stories of Sitting Bull and Squanto this week, and much of the girls pretend play continues to involve "wearing clothes made out of animal skin," hiking through the country, and paddling boats. We also read the folktales The Legend of the Blue Bonnet and The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush. Fortunately, the big girls at least seem to have developed a very good sense of separating which stories are about real people from a long time ago versus stories written by those people a long time ago. After reading the Indian Paintbrush book, we talked about how most Native Americans didn't have a written language the way we do, so they often painted pictures on animal skins to help them remember stories and history--the way Little Gopher does in the book. Since we didn't have stretched buckskins like his, we made do with big pieces of construction paper instead, and I asked Monkey and Bug to paint about a story, then tell me about it.

Bug's story: He's an Indian warrior going to fight. He's riding a horse,
holding a spear, and the green arrow is showing which way he's going.

Monkey's story: A knight was going home, but a HUGE rainstorm came,
and he got lost. Before the storm, a monster attacked and ate his horse.
That's why he doesn't have one. But the knight found his home anyway,
so it was a happy ending.

Little Scientists
I haven't mentioned doing science lessons before because most of the time we just don't. These girls are insatiably curious, and I've checked off all the kindergarten science standards just by answering the questions they come up with every day (and of course we cover tons of subjects that aren't listed). This week though Monkey and Bug wanted to do some real experimenting since they happened upon a book about bubble experiments at the library. I gathered a bunch of supplies, took us all outside, and facilitated some intentional bubble play time. Then I explained that real scientist always keep a record of what they did and what they learned. I offered to write things down for them, and here's what they said:

• We made triangle, square, and rectangle things to blow bubbles with, but the bubbles all came out circles
• We made bubbles with straws and overflowed the cup.
• Bubbles stick to things that are bubbly. They can stick to water too.
• We made pictures with bubbles.
• We got soap all over our hands, and we could catch bubbles. We could see what a real bib bubble looks like. They had colors, but some just looked clear.

Later in the week, they asked me to help them make paper airplanes. They spent a long time playing/experimenting with those, and came up with these results:

• We can throw it really far.
• To make it flip we hold straight up and throw it that way.
• We threw them backwards, and they flipped that way too.
• We tried to hit things with them.

This week I also introduced them to the Magic School Bus (thank you, Netflix)--very popular! Ms. Frizzle introduced the girls to the Solar System, and of course didn't provide quite enough info for my crew, so we pulled out our book about outer space (thank you, Grandma & Granddad) and read up some more on all the planets. (Did you know Neptune has a pink moon?! The girls--especially Monkey--found this very exciting.)

Playing with Language
Thanks to a scene from Brother Bear (in which a kid bear tries to get a young adult bear to call him by name), we talked about syllables and practiced clapping out the syllables in our own names and other words.

Monkey and Bug have also discovered suffixes. They've gotten to be good enough readers that more of their lessons include words with -s, -ed, and -ing endings, and they recognize those as separate from the base words. This has resulted in their experimenting with other suffixes in everyday conversation with new words like these being added to their vocabulary:

• office: verb, any action taken by an officer; e.g., "What are you officing now?" (Monkey annoyed after being repeatedly "pulled over" by Police Officer Bug while driving the china cabinet)
• realizable: adjective, capable of being noticed; e.g., "I was being so quiet I was hardly realizable." (Bug proudly after a particularly quiet car ride)

Library Day
The theme this week was hats, and the girls got to make paper visors for the craft this week. The librarian also pulled out the parachute and a couple of balls this week.
There's a Dragon in the Library
Tap Tap Bang Bang
Truckery Rhymes
A Kiss for Little Bear
I Will Fly!
The Legend of the Blue Bonnet (Native American folktale)
1, 2, Buckle My Shoe
Eat Your Way from A to Z!

One Last Pool Day
The pool closes at the end of this week, so we did one last morning at the pool (it's amazing how quickly they get through lessons with that motivation). It was a bit cool, but we stayed about an hour and had a great time. They practiced jumping in, paddling around with and without noodles, and using their kickboards.

Dentist 
This week's non-lesson weekday was occupied by all three girls going to the dentist. They were awesome! Even Goose let the dental hygienist use the special spinning toothbrush to clean her teeth! Fortunately, our dentist is really good about explaining all her tools and what she's doing, so it proved to be quite the educational experience all on its own. I think we surprised her though when she expected (with three little girls) to see their "sparkly princess teeth" and was greeted with shiny monster grins and roars instead.

We made the unpleasant discovery that it's time to say goodbye to Goose's paci--at least during the day time. It's starting to effect her teeth, and so far Goose has willingly handed it over to be put away when she wakes up; although, we're still dealing with meltdowns a couple of times a day when I won't give it back until bedtime. Fortunately, she's been very motivated by "being a big girl" lately, so we'll make it.

Visiting Uncle K
This past weekend we decided to take the girls on a mini-vacation to visit their great uncle K, and we had a wonderful time. Uncle K lives in a lake house just outside a relatively big city, so we had quite a variety of activities to enjoy.

Into the Wild!
The girls had a blast just exploring Uncle K's yard, which (unlike our typically suburban postage stamp of grass) is all trees, bushes, and rock steps going down a hill to the dock. I know at some point they were actively hunting for spider webs and were really excited when they found a few with visible spiders.

Uncle K has three boats--a canoe, a kayak, and a motorized fishing boat--and the girls all got to take a ride in each of them. Monkey and Bug were particularly excited about the canoe and kayak originally being Native American boats that we've seen in our books. They didn't do any paddling themselves this time, but they've decided they're definitely going to learn how when they get bigger. At some point I went back to the dock to hang out (aah, peace and quiet with a good book), while Goose piled into the kayak with Daddy and the big girls joined Uncle K on the fishing boat for a longer excursion. They even got to explore up a small river that feeds into the lake.

Of course, we did more extensive exploring on land too. Uncle K led us down the road to a trail head in his neighborhood, and we followed the trail to a pile of huge rocks that were perfect for climbing around on. On the way home the girls decided they wanted to lead the hike and took off at a run down the trail. Daddy followed close on the heels of the big girls to make sure they really did follow the trail while Uncle K and I lagged behind to follow Goose's lead. All three girls actually did a very decent job of paying attention and sticking to the the trail. They only needed a couple of course corrections to get back.

Roaring from the top of the big rocks!

Urban Adventures
On Sunday we decided to take the light rail into the city to let the girls get up close and personal with some skyscrapers again. They were really excited about the train! It's the first time they've been on a real train (the kiddie one at the zoo doesn't count--it doesn't even have tracks), and they loved it. Particularly cool moments were the sightings of the first skyscrapers and getting to ride the train through a building!

Very excited about their first train ride!

Once downtown we just did some walking around and went through the book themed park that we discovered last time were in town. We got to explore some new sculptures this time though, since a different set of sprinklers were on.

We happened to be downtown just as an Indian Festival was getting underway. The girls played in a bouncy house for a while, then we did a quick walk through the booths to admire all the beautiful dresses, jewelry and pictures. After that unexpected adventure we actually got to go in one of the skyscrapers. Most of the building was closed to the public, of course, but we got to see a small indoor garden, and we went up to the 8th floor of the parking garage to look out. The parking garage had the added of fun of being extremely good for making echoes. We stopped for lunch at a deli a couple of floors up a different building and found seats by the window--very cool for a trio of little ones excited about big buildings!

We took the train back to Uncle K's, then got in our own car to head home. Not a long visit, but a good one. I doubt he could hear them, but he girls were yelling, "I love you, Uncle K!" as we pulled out of his driveway.

Pool Time
Monday was one of those "this is why I love homeschooling" days. By 10 a.m. the girls had finished all their formal lessons, so we headed out for a two-hour health & safety and PE class, i.e., we went to the neighborhood pool, which we had all to ourselves. This process involved answering questions about why we wear sunscreen and how swimming is a form of exercise, reviewing pool safety rules, and of course working on actual swimming skills. All three girls can paddle around the pool independently with floaty noodles tied around their waists. Monkey and Bug both practiced doing star fish floats (Bug has gotten really good at this), and Bug also tried actually dog paddling without the noodle on for a long time. Goose also worked on getting in and out of the pool by herself. Their favorite game during this pool visit was to throw sponge balls out into the pool to swim out to. I just tried to stay centrally located in case anyone needed assistance.

Library Day
Story time is back! The theme for the first fall session was simply books, and the librarian had some fun books about books to share. Then the girls got to make bookmarks that said "I <3 Books" by gluing magazine cutouts to strips of poster board. We got to hangout with some of our usual friends as well as make a new one (a fellow milspouse who's new to the area and her toddler son). As usual we came home with lots of books (including a small collection of picture book biographies for our Native American history unit):
Bye Bye Binky!
Can I Throw Your Ball?
Pamela the Camel
ABC
How Chipmunk Got His Stripes (Native American folktale)
Sacagawea
The Boy Called Slow (biography of Sitting Bull)
Squanto and the Pilgrims

Milestones

Bug's been very into skyscrapers, and she
constructed this huge one out of Legos. She
even thought through building a wider base,
so it would fall over as easily.

The big one this week was Bug's deciding that she is really, really done sucking her thumb. She's been trying very hard, but this week she said she was really having trouble remembering and asked if we could put a bandaid on her thumb to keep her from putting it in her mouth. We've gone through a lot of bandaids, but it's working!

Kind of funny milestone: Goose figured out how to swish and spit, so she's using big kid toothpaste just like her sister's now! It's a little thing, but she was very excited about getting to do something like a big girl.

Goose's other "big girl" thing is that she now gets to go to the preschool Bible study on Wednesday nights. Monkey and Bug are in there too (other church night activities don't start until 1st grade), and Goose was the only kid in the nursery. The nursery worker and preschool teacher talked it over, and we decided to Goose could handle the activities and would probably have a lot more fun with the other kids.

Lessons
We did official lessons (as opposed to the learning they do all the time everywhere) four days this week, which I've decided is going to be my goal.

Goose has decided that, at least at the moment and unlike her sisters, she's not that into coloring sheets (there goes that plan). However, Bug has been absolutely thrilled to read ABC and counting books to Goose, while I work with Monkey. Then whenever Monkey's done, she whisks Goose off into whatever their pretend play of the day is going be, so it all works out anyway.

For reading, Bug is getting to where most of her reading is done "the fast way" without having to sound out every letter, and her stories continue growing in length and shrinking in font size. Monkey continues working on her sounding out skills, but she's getting better everyday (only a few words requiring sounding out half a dozen times before it clicks; she goes through most words just a couple of times). I've also made her lessons a little more enticing by incorporating her word lists into short somewhat nonsensical stories and having her read just the words from the list, while I read the rest. (Interesting learning style difference: Bug loves conquering a list and seeing just how far she can go; Monkey couldn't care less about how many words she read--she needs them to mean something more significant!)

They're still very into the math workbooks, and both girls continue to usually do more than required. This week Monkey did more addition and practicing writing numbers, while Bug did more shapes, measuring, and comparisons. They got their new Puzzle Buzz magazines, so I let them count completing some of those dot-to-dot, mazes, and hidden picture puzzles as their math lessons. Bug has also been discovering multiplication on her own this week. A typical totally-out-of-the-blue interchange goes like this:
     Bug: How many is two 10s?
     Me: Twenty
     Bug: So, that means four 5's is twenty, right?
     Me: Yep

This week I finally remembered to make handwriting part of our usual lessons. Bug is very into it, and has systematically written the entire alphabet (upper and lowercase) a couple of times by going through a dry erase workbook. She also wrote a couple of sentences all by herself (interesting--she had all the write letters in each word, but not always in the right order, i.e., over her drawing of a sheep "Cna ti baa?" = "Can it baa?") Monkey is practicing letters more at random. She has a favorite pen she likes to use, and she practices on blank paper whatever letters catch her fancy, verifying with me that she has them facing the right way. She can write her name all by herself now!

More Native American Adventures
This week we talked a lot about houses and boats. We actually flipped through the DK book looking for all the different kinds of houses they lived in, noting what materials they used and how many people would have lived in each one. The girls were most intrigued by teepees: "When they need to move, they don't need to find a next new house like we do. They just pack up the whole house and move it with them!" They were very excited when we went for a playdate at their friend V's house, and he had a teepee they could play in. They noted with disappointment that it was just made out of cloth though, not animals skins like a real one. The topic of boats came up after reading the story of Sacagawea (which they loved). We talked about different kinds of boats the Native Americans used (canoes, kayaks, and bullboats are the ones that came up), and the girls have spent a long time exploring "new lands" by paddling their "great big canoe" (the couch).

We made mini totem poles this week too. I found some good templates online that the girls used to color faces. We also watched some YouTube videos about how real totem poles are carved. While the girls colored, I discovered NativeRadio.com--a great source of free streaming Native American music. The girls really liked all the drums featured in the songs we heard.

In addition to reading the Sacagawea story, we read several Native American folktales that we happen to own copies of. We didn't get to the other biographies from the library this week, but I'm planning to keep them around for a few weeks anyway for repeated readings.

Business as Usual
While we did our official beginning-of-the-year breakfast several weeks ago, this is the first week that we actually returned to the usual fall routine. Karate is still going, and mid-week church activities and our weekly homeschool group have started back up. We even managed to consistently do our formal lessons first thing every morning!

I've even been a bit more organized for Goose now. I printed up ABC and number coloring sheets for her to work on while her sisters are busy with their work, and I've made a point to do more Goose-specific read-alouds in the morning (the kind of books the big girls had read to them repeatedly when they were 2, but that tend to get passed over now that they're 5). Goose knows the ABC song, so now we're trying to work on more letter recognition, and Bug has been really on top of teaching Goose her numbers (she can count objects accurately up to at least 6).

Goose and Monkey also worked on their names--Monkey in actually writing hers using a worksheet I made that removes one additional letter from her name each line until she's written out the whole thing; Goose colored in/traced her name on an outline version. Bug's real name is actually really short too, so she's mastered it already and she did her own thing while I worked with Monkey.

Monkey and Bug continue their reading lessons. They know all the basic phonetic sounds now, so they're just plugging away at actually sounding out words and picking up on common sight words. In fact, just to satisfy my curiosity I printed up a checklist for each of them with the twenty most common words. Bug knew 17 of them--many of by sight and some by sounding them out. Monkey knew or sounded out 5, but then decided to dig her heels in and refuse to sound out any more (we had a small bug perched nearby issuing less than encouraging comments about ones Monkey had to sound out that she just knew. Serious discussions were had with both of them). I've managed to get Monkey back to reading from the textbook or at least from Bob books (a set of easy readers that correspond pretty nicely to our curriculum), so her lessons will be a little more systematic now.

They were really into math this week! In addition to spontaneously breaking out into sums (confirming aloud at random sums up to 10), they each did at least three pages a day from their math workbooks (they each have ones for numbers, math concepts, addition, and subtraction--at this point I let them choose which they work from). They've both been working a lot on actually writing numerals this week. Monkey also spent time on measuring activities and shapes pages (not just identifying standard shapes, but doing activities like figuring out which shapes were put together to create 3-D shapes, i.e., two circles and a rectangle make a cylinder). Bug chose to spend time working on subtraction problems and counting money.

Finally their favorite subject--history! Our studies of Native Americans continues. We read through the book about Pocahontas several times, and we even managed to find some coloring sheets that were more historically accurate than the plethora of Disney ones out there. The girls were particularly excited about finding one that pictured her as a child and one with a grown-up Pocahontas with John Rolfe and their son Thomas. We spent lots of time perusing the DK book, of course (it's organized by geographic region instead of by topic, which is what the girls would prefer since they tend to ask about subjects not places). This week we looked at different Native American masks--and made our own obviously. Then we studied all the different styles of clothing and the pictures and patterns they decorated them with. For this subject, we went with the classic paper bag vests and construction paper & feather headdresses. For the bases of the headdresses, the girls suggested we use the crowns they made at church earlier in the week. It all worked beautifully! (Unfortunately, the pictures did not turn out--they won't open on my computer. Hopefully, I can get this sorted out for next week's post.)

Library Day
There's no storytime yet (it starts up next week), but these girls were desperate to get more library books since we never made it to the library last week after returning from our trip. I got in touch with a friend and we met up for a playdate at the library Tuesday. The kids had fun playing and looking at books, and Miss M and I got to chitchat. Of course, we came home with lots of books:
Time to Sleep, Sheep the Sheep!
There Is a Bird on My Head!
Leonardo the Terrible Monster
Turk and Runt
The Tiny Tortilla
Night Rabbits
Pocahontas
How Thunder and Lightning Came to Be (a Native American folktale)

Dragon Club Members!
Monkey and Bug were super excited about getting back to their karate classes this week! They were invited  join Dragon Club, an extra 15 minutes of class for a select group of students to learn weapons (nunchucks and bow staff) and "kicks & tricks" (a bit more advanced combinations plus a little gymnastics). They actually picked up on the nunchuck routines faster than we anticipated they would.

Church: Study & Service
All the regular activities have started up again at church. On Wednesday, the girls and I enjoyed a church night supper with a couple of other members, then Monkey and Bug went cheerfully off for the pre-k and kindergarten Bible study (where they studied the story of King David and made those crowns). Poor Goose was the only one in the nursery. There wasn't even a nursery worker at first, but after waiting awhile I dropped her off in the class with her sisters, so I could get to my own class. The nursery worker did eventually appear, but she decided to keep Goose in the pre-k class anyway (curious to see what happens next week).

On Friday I took the entourage to assist a couple of other moms and I with setting up the fellowship hall for a potluck luncheon happening on Sunday. They were thrilled to have a real job to do at church. Bug learned how to properly set a table and took over the task of placing the forks and spoons. Monkey and Goose handled the centerpieces--for a football-themed event this involved setting out megaphones, mini-footballs, and confetti on every table (I was impressed with how little confetti ended up on the floor actually). All three of them helped us set out plates, and we grown ups were impressed how quickly we got the job done!