Daddy Date . . . with weaponry
Since Monday was a holiday and Daddy got to stay home from work, we decided to ditch our usual lessons. I opted to escape the house for the morning to run a few errands and enjoy the peace and quiet of the local library, and the girls got some quality time with Daddy. They decided to stay home and shoot things in the backyard. They got out their air rifle and bow and arrows and did some damage to a couple of tin cans and empty milk jugs. Daddy got them a shooting stick recently, and it really helped them improve their aim.

Library Day
It was fire safety day at the library this week, so instead of the usual story time we listened to a couple of firefighters talk about safety, show us what they look like all geared up, and give us a tour of the fire truck. The girls were a bit disappointed that the librarian didn't read any firefighter books or have a project, but they loved seeing the truck! And of course, we came home with lots of books:
Swimming Lessons
When Turtle Grew Feathers (a hilarious Choctaw folktale similar to Aesop's The Tortoise and the Hare)
Rumpelstiltskin
Time-out for Sophie
Henny-Penny
Nuts to You!
Wee Little Bunny
The Pigeon Wants a Puppy
Pigs Make Me Sneeze!

The Three Rs
It's definitely still a challenge, but Bug is getting much more confident in reading "the new way" with regular text instead of phonetic clues. She's even managed to do things like read some of the directions in her math workbook! Monkey continues to improve as well, and I've been impressed with how much she can do at once and how much better she's getting at knowing when she needs a break and requesting one appropriately.

It's been hard to motivate them to practice handwriting, so we started a new thing that week that they're pretty excited about. Monkey and Bug each have a composition book where each page is half handwriting lines and half blank space for a picture. On the handwriting lines, I write several sentences with blanks for them to fill in. It'll be fun to have it all in one book, and see their improvement over time.

They've both been back at doing pages in their math workbooks--they're making their way through the addition one now. I also made a bunch of multiplication flash cards. Monkey wasn't interested and I haven't pushed it at all, but Bug loves them! She knows anything times 1 or 0 and up to 2x5. Any problems higher than that she still uses the abacus to figure out.

We acquired a variety pack of paintbrushes recently.
The girls had lots of fun using the spongey ones to mix colors.

Cartwheels & Somersaults
Monkey and Bug have been learning how to do cartwheels and somersaults in their karate class recently, and they are absolutely determined to get them right. They practice every single day--frequently more than once a day. They can both do somersaults, and they are SO close to getting their cartwheels right. This is actually the first time I've seen Monkey so self-disciplined in working toward a goal. She even has a plan for the steps she's going to take to teach Goose and their friend V how to do cartwheels once they're old enough.

Hypothetical Heroes
We watched Monsters, Inc. this past Sunday, which means my week was chock full of questions about plot points, character's motivations, and the practical logistics of magic portals in an alternate universe. By the end of the week Monkey and Bug had come up with a plan for what they would do if they lived in the world created by Pixar: When their monster came into their room, Monkey would roar back at it, then Bug would take advantage of the moment of surprise to knock it out with a few of her punching drills from karate class. After subduing the monster, they would sneak into the monster world and steal all the doors. Then--because they know how to break boards--they would destroy all the doors and save all the kids in the whole world from being scared by monsters.

Social Butterflies
We had a really busy end of the week! Friday at lunchtime we attended our homeschool group's fall picnic at the local riding stables. I didn't realize this, but the stables have a huge, fun playground. The girls had a blast playing on the playground, participating in (Bug) or just witnessing (Monkey and Goose) the breaking of a pinata, and making friends with a trio of donkeys. Meanwhile, I got to have a nice long conversation with a fellow milspouse who recently moved here from our next duty station.

Friday night we attended a formal military occasion--Daddy and I got to dress up and have fun with some of our friends, and the girls dressed up to come along and hang out in child care rooms. Goose even got to play with her friend V. Then on Saturday morning (after they all slept in!), we met our friends V, C, and Miss M at the big library playground. They had a great time. Fortunately for me and Miss M, my girls have gotten really good at chasing down V and herding him back in our direction. Monkey and Bug in particular seem to get a kick out of being the responsible big kids.

New Traditions
I realized we started a few new traditions recently. The first one just kind of happened as part of my lazy Sunday resolution: I realized that for the past month or so we've watched a movie together and had a picnic on the living room floor. Sometimes it's related to something they're studying (like Brother Bear for our Native American studies or Ninja Turtles for their karate classes) and sometimes it's just a good, fun movie (like the Aristocats). We've decided we're keeping this routine.

Then Daddy started a "great books and bonding with Daddy" tradition. On the four nights a week that he does the bedtime story he reads them a chapter out of a kid-friendly novel. (Goose isn't as big a fan of this new routine, but I read picture books on my nights to do bedtime.)They recently finished The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Monkey and Bug loved it! I got to hear all about the White Witch, Mr. Tumnus, Lucy, etc. Now they've started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. 

The last recently started tradition began with the coincidental timing of Bug's request that we do this and the same activity suggested from a parenting book I'm reading: Every day I try to spend a few minutes (like 5, maybe 10) with each girl individually. I know I spend all day, everyday with them en masse, but they rarely get one-on-one time. Now that Goose is turning out to be just as talkative as Bug, they're competing for conversation and poor Monkey never gets a word in edgewise. At the moment it's worked out to build these one-on-one moments into quiet time, and each girl gets to talk about whatever she wants. So far only Monkey has needed any prompting, but getting her going is as simple as asking what she's happy about today.

Mmmm....Pumpkins!
Speaking of traditions, autumn is here, and once again we decided to eat a pumpkin instead of decorating it. This year our grocery store actually has sugar pie pumpkins, and it was delicious! We roasted the seeds and just ate the rest of the pumpkin mashed with butter, brown sugar, and a few spices. It all disappeared quick, so I'm sure we'll be doing that again this season.

Zoo Day!
For our "no lessons" day this week, we headed to the zoo. The weather was looking a little ominous, but I'm so glad we took the risk. The weather stayed comfortably cool, but never rained, we had the zoo practically all to ourselves, and the animals were all awake and active. Highlights of this visit included riding the carousel, petting a boa constrictor (closely supervised by a couple of zookeepers), going nose to nose (through the glass) with a silverback gorilla, watching the other gorilla play in their indoor rooms, and finding at least one animal to represent each letter of the alphabet (at the end of the day we were only missing 3 letters in our list).

The girls insisted we take their usual photo atop the elephant statue!

Library Day
Storytime this week featured snakes--appropriately enough considering our zoo visit of the day before! We got to hear lots of fun books, and make construction paper chain snakes of our own. We came home with these books:
Tell the Truth, B. B. Wolf
Count and See
We Are in a Book!
Jump!
Wave
Shapes and Things
The Polar Bear Son (Inuit folktale)
How Rabbit Lost His Tail (Cherokee folktale)

The Three R's
Bug hit a major milestone in her reading lessons this week! She's now transitioning from reading with phonetic marks to just reading a normal serif typeface. She's was a bit intimidated by reading without all the clues, but the curriculum handles the switch well, and she's so excited about being able to read real books! She and I have already started talking about what her reading lessons will look like once she's done with the textbook. Monkey didn't have any major changes in her reading this week, but she's continuing to get better. She's also started taking more interest in how far ahead Bug is and what her lessons look like (we'll see if it's motivating enough for her to do the extra work and catch up. She's already working through the book at a faster pace than Bug did).

They did a couple pages from their workbooks this week, and they did lots of addition with manipulatives (the abacus is probably their favorite). We also played a game of Magic: The Gathering this week. They can definitely do more math in their heads than they'll admit to during a typical lesson! Monkey started figuring out multiplication on her own this week too. At some point while contemplating her own hands, she realized that two 5s made 10, then she borrowed her sisters' hands and sorted out multiplying by 5s up to 30. I love watching them make discoveries like this!

In addition to all the biology knowledge absorbed at the zoo, we watched The Magic School Bus episode touring the digestive system and looked it up in their anatomy book. On the way home from church Wednesday night, we had another discussion about the solar system. We discussed why the moon looked different on different nights (it was a crescent moon that night), and noted that the bright "star" we saw was actually the planet Venus (they thought this was awesome!). A sign that all this science talk is sinking in: Bug's first question after being informed it was a planet not a star was "Venus--is that one of the gas planets or the solid planets?"

Outside of reading the folktales listed among our library books we really didn't do any history this week. That probably means it's time to start planning our next unit!

Q & A
My days consist of an endless stream of questions, and it really struck me this week how far Monkey and Bug have come from the simple, "Why?" Here's a sampling of the questions the entourage has asked me (and I have attempted to accurately answer) this week:

• How does my body move?
• Who invented the toilet?
• Can anything really scrape the sky?
• How do birds land on cacti?
• What's the quadratic formula?
• Stars make an explosion or storm when they die, right?
• Do blue and orange make purple?
• Why do we have to get shots?

Library Day
Thanks to a well-child doctor appointment for Monkey and Bug (a whole learning experience in itself), we missed the actual storytime this week. Fortunately, we still got there in time to visit with some of our favorite friends, and of course, we came home with a ton of books:
Where is Coco Going?
Barn Cat
Silent Lotus
Are You Ready to Play Outside?
The Adventure of Louey and Frank
Brave Wolf and the Thunderbird
Pocahontas
Jackson Pollock
Claude Monet
The Christmas Star
Black Cat

Choosing Careers
I imagine when you ask most 5 year olds what they want to be when they grow up, you get answers like cowboy, princess, or firefighter, and this provides fodder for cute dress up and pretend play. Bug and Monkey seem to have been cut from different cloth: This week they decided they want to be an architect (Bug) and an artist (Monkey), and they are now seriously pursuing these careers (I imagine I will help them seriously pursue hundreds of careers before they actually find a real one).

Bug has been intensely building for weeks now, creating miniature versions of the Great China Wall, a variety of skyscrapers (with wider bases, so they wouldn't tip over), and--her most involved project--a Lego house complete with a floor, four walls, two windows, a door, and furniture (she noted that the roof had to be imaginary, so she could play with it). She even figured out that if she made the walls out of single-wide bricks instead of double-wide bricks there would be more room inside, that she needed to overlap the bricks at the corners so they wouldn't be wobbly, and that she needed to add stools under the windows after realizing she'd installed them too high for the Lego figures to see out of. After completing the house, she informed me that she wanted to build real buildings when she grew up; she wanted to be . . . "What was Uncle K?" "An architect?" "Yes! I'm going to be an architect!" I told her about the magazines with floor plans for houses in them, and her eyes just lit up! We did a bookstore trip for that and several other things, and she's spent a long time poring over the drawings in the magazine and in a book about skyscrapers we happened upon.

After Bug kept talking about her career choice, Monkey figured out what she wanted to be: An artist! "Because I like to draw and paint, and I can make pretty pictures or scary pictures! I'll practice a lot more now!" Of course, being a child of her parents, she also requested books that would help her learn to draw and paint. Fortunately, I still had a book about drawing techniques left from my college studies of graphic design, which she's very excited about. I also suggested she study famous artwork, and both she and Bug have been avidly looking through my books about art history and famous paintings. She wanted to get a book about a famous artist from the library this week, so I pulled out the first four artist biographies I came across and told her to pick one. She glanced at the covers and grabbed for Jackson Pollock with no hesitation! Anyone's who's seen Monkey's artwork will understand why he held such attraction for her.

I found the girls upstairs drawing and made my usual request: Tell me about
your picture. Bug's on the left is inspired by our history lessons and her explanation
is detailed and factual: "It's two Indians on horses hunting buffalo, and a teepee with
a fire inside, and two flowers and an Indian outside." Monkey's on the right gets
breathless storytelling: "It's at a fancy party--all the colored pieces are guests--
and the bad guys come--that's all the brown spots--then the Ninja Turtles come--
that's the green lines zooming around--don't worry, Mommy, nobody gets killed."

She loved going through the book and speculating about what emotions he was feeling while painting different works. Monkey was particularly excited about his energetic and experimental painting method, so we decided to do a "Paint like Pollock" project. We headed outside with a long sheet of paper, a variety of paint colors, and anything we could think of to paint with: feathers, cotton balls, pipe cleaners, foamy shapes, Popsicle sticks, and straws. All three girls got involved and had a blast!

Fancy History
Early this week Monkey and Bug woke up with a craving for making beaded necklaces, so being a good homeschooling mom I pulled out the beads and string . . . and the history book about Native Americans. While they worked on their creations (even Goose managed to string a few beads), we looked at all the different colors, shapes, and uses for beads from decorating clothes and baby carriers to being exchanged as currency.

Later this week, we decided to do some YouTube searching and found lots of good videos of Native American dances. They had fun admiring all the elaborate costumes, and they particularly liked the shawl dances and hoop dances. Of course, we got a couple of relevant books from the library this week too: a folktale that introduced them to Thunderbirds and another retelling of the Pocahontas story.

From Blood Cells to Outer Space
Inspired by the Magic School Bus, we continued talking about the solar system and we jumped in depth into some anatomy and physiology topics. The sporadically ask me to review the names of all the planets and key characteristics (Jupiter has the big red storm, Saturn has rings, etc.). They occasionally decided to go spinning around the living room pretending to be planets in orbit. They also asked if we could specifically review the earth's and moon's orbits by acting them out with balls and a flashlight.

Last week they had watched an episode in which Ms. Frizzle and her class took a tour through a sick classmate's body to explore the immune system. This inspired a number of questions that weren't addressed in their little kid-level body books. So, at the bookstore we found a great grown-up anatomy book with lots of colorful pictures and diagrams. This week we studied the immune system (they wanted to know all about antibodies, helper t-cells, etc.), the nervous system (different kinds of nerve endings, how impulses get to the brain, cross synapses, etc.), and teeth (baby teeth vs. permanent teeth and the why and how they switch). Monkey in particular has spent a lot of time just flipping through the pages and studying the diagrams.

Lessons
Of course, we did all the usual lessons too. Bug's getting even better at sounding out the words in her head, and her reading comprehension is really improving. Monkey even did double lessons a couple days this week, which meant she read a list of sounds, a list of words, and a brief story all in one day. She's also getting better at being able to tell when she needs a "brain break" before finishing the lesson--this means more gets done with less agonizing!

For math this week, we mostly worked with the addition flash cards I made--not using them like traditional flashcards, but I hand them each a small stack to work through however they wish. For the small sums, they can usually just tell me the answer, and they use a variety of manipulatives to work through the others. Bug really likes using the abacus, and Monkey uses whatever's close at hand--bits of felt from the felt board, screws from the play workbench, etc. Daddy also did some extra math, discussing positive and negative numbers and explaining the quadratic equation at their request (that came up because of a kid's CD, Brain Beats that includes a song about it). Funny note, when they asked about it in the car, I had to confess that I didn't actually remember it despite the fact that I studied when I was a big kid. I admitted that once we got past arithmetic Daddy (who taught high school math) would take over teaching math. Bug reassured me that once Daddy taught it to her, she would teach it to me and maybe I'd remember it this time.

One day this week, the girls decided to play restaurant, and they had quite the set up complete with a couple of little tables and a menu board that they wrote and illustrated themselves. In the midst of that I reviewed money values with them, so they could actually figure out how many coins to hand over based on the prices they wrote on the board. Lessons in handwriting and math--done!

Saturday's Outing
We got the girls out of bed early this Saturday to join a bunch of Daddy's coworkers for a busy and fun Saturday morning. Monkey and Bug went with Daddy to participate in a highway clean up, while Goose and I stayed behind to clean up the playground (cleaning the playground wasn't part of the official plan, but it helped Goose feel better about not participating with her sisters). All three girls were really excited about doing their part to keep God's world clean. Once the clean up was done we stuck around for the dedication of two memorials and a really tasty barbecue lunch. The girls made a couple of new friends, and I ended up following all five kids around while they explored the edge of the lake: watching boats, identifying geese and hawks, chasing butterflies, determining whether the thing floating in the water was a baby crocodile or a stick, and examining the sap dripping from a tree that had some of the bark ripped off. I did manage to keep them all from actually getting fully into the lake, but I think they all ended up muddy--just one of the hazards of being inquisitive little kids!