California Sunshine!
The sunshine was back this week, and we really took advantage of it! We actually got out to the beach twice this week (perks of discovering beach 

I also helped the girls master the art of making towers with
wet sand and empty cups. Bug was extremely proud of her
little building with a feather in the top for a flag.

access with free parking only a 5-minute drive away). The girls had a blast of course, but here's the educational side of things: examining kelp in various stages of drying out, getting up close and personal with mole crab skeletons, identifying various coastal birds and trying to guess which lone feathers belong to which kind, noting the different properties of wet versus dry sand, and checking out the effect tumbling around in the surf has on sticks, stones, and glass. (This, dear readers, is why I've yet to bother spending money on a science curriculum.) The real fun for me was watching how characteristically different the girls played when given complete freedom: Goose immediately and industriously buried herself up to her waist in sand (then leapt out of it before I could snap a photo), Monkey found a piece of driftwood and experimented with creating large designs in the sand, and Bug planned and executed a major project--recruiting and instructing her sisters in digging a boat-shaped hole big enough for all of them to sit in at once.





A sampling of Monkey's lessons outside

At some point I looked up
from my work in the kitchen
to see Monkey on the porch
rail contemplating how to
get up on the roof. She
decided their wasn't a feasible
route and clambered down
eventually.

We enjoyed the fresh air by doing some of our lessons
outside too--sitting on the bench on the front porch for reading lessons and covering the front sidewalk with math and writing lessons. Whichever girls weren't actively doing lessons were riding their scooters around. Eventually lessons ended and they migrated to backyard to enjoy several more hours of daylight.

The girls and I also finally found a homeschool playgroup! It turns out our pastor's family is part of a group that meets at a local playground, and his wife Miss K invited us to join them this week. The girls were really excited about getting to play with their friend K3 (K2 and K1, her big sisters, were involved in an organized gym class at the time). They decided the biggest climbing structure was a volcano, and they made it their mission to "rescue all the people" (just pretend people, they clarified for me) by escorting them all down the "emergency slides."

Library Day
The storytime theme was sounds this week, and the librarian had a really fun selection of books picked out. Of course, she also had a fun selection of participation-requested songs and games, which my girls chose not to do. I've been trying to at least get Goose--usually my extrovert--to jump in, but no luck yet. We found lots of good books to take home though!
The Butterflies' Promise
Dewey: There's a Cat in the Library
Abuelos
Moo in the Morning
Mrs. Spitzer's Garden
Alphabet Explosion! Search and Find
Rhinos who Rescue
Uno, Dos, Tres = One, Two, Three
Joshua James Likes Trucks
Loving

The Three Rs
This week Goose learned the letter E and continued practicing counting. Bug even took it on her own initiative to help Goose practice writing letters with very nice results. Monkey and Bug also made up some games to help her review colors.

Monkey continued reading Ten Apples up on Top for reading, and now that she's got her numbers down (at least through 20), we went back and practiced addition again. She was pretty excited about how much easier those problems are now! She's also successfully using the number line to help her solve problems. She and Bug continued copying Bible verses from their envelopes of hearts for writing.

A sample of their writing lessons this week (Bug's on the left; Monkey's on the right)
I feel I should note here that Monkey's work wasn't sloppily executed. She likes
experimenting with letter forms (making them wobbly, tall, etc.) and creatively arranging
the lines of text. At some point we'll have to work on useful legibility, but not yet.

Bug finally finished the Little Bear collection of stories just in time to return it to the library, and she read the first 20 pages of Are You My Mother? She is finally piecing together how much all the hard work is paying off when she suddenly realized how much she was reading "the fast way" now! For math this week, she really solidified her addition skills--adding multi-digit numbers and adding three numbers together. She also struggled through the process of learning to work on her own--actually completing nine problems of increasing difficulty then having me check her work rather than having me at her elbow for the whole process. By the end of the week, she was actually excited about the challenge and wanted to try figuring out on her own the ones she got wrong before I walked her through them.

Little Ninjas
Monkey and Bug definitely consider themselves ninjas-in-training, and they're working hard for their jujitsu class. Daddy helped them come up with a plan to work on their front and back rolls--the skill they're most struggling with right now. They've actually remembered on their own to do 10 front rolls and 10 back rolls every day. They take turns, watching each other work through them and offering tips. Bug even came up with the idea to keep track of how many they do with the abacus, so they don't have to try remembering what number they're on.

History
We're still studying the pioneers. We looked through the Discovery Kids magazine some more and spent lots of time looking through the spreads about what they did for fun--especially when lots of families could get together. In our Little House on the Prairie readings, we learned about digging wells and got to see the Ingalls' reaction to their first (fortunately, peaceful) encounter with Native Americans (who we studied not too long ago). While the Ingalls are settling into their new home, my girls are still taken with the idea of the covered wagons, which keep appearing in their pretend play.

 

Art Museum!
I took my little entourage to check out the local art museum this week. Monkey in particular was very excited; she's declared that someday her artwork is going to be in a museum too. The museum features a permanent exhibit of local paintings and several permanent sculptures outside. The current temporary exhibits included one of huge local landscapes (the girls got a thrill out of recognizing familiar turf), one of hand-colored photography from 1880s Japan (the girls were fascinated by both the samurai and the fancy kimonos), and an exhibit of black-and-white photography (mostly landscapes). We talked about what we saw in the art and what we particularly liked. The girls behaved beautifully, and we got lots of smiles from other patrons (let's be honest, you don't see a lot of preschoolers patronizing the visual fine arts!). The girls wanted to bring their cameras, and we got permission from a staff member to take photos as long as we didn't use a flash. Bug went a bit snap happy, and she was really excited to show Daddy what we'd seen at the museum that day (every single work of art).

After the art museum, we went across the street to explore Friendship Plaza,
a fun little garden with bricked paths and this fountain.

Library Day
Of course this week's theme was Valentine's Day. A new librarian was leading storytime this week, and she brought a couple of "friends" (puppets) with her that the girls got a real kick out of. We came home with these books this week:
Mommy's Little Monster
Hello, Day!
Seven Stars, More!
Something Special
The Night Before Christmas
Elephants Cannot Dance!
George and Martha Back in Town
King Arthur's Very Great Grandson
The Biggest House in the World
On My Way to the Bath
A Summery Saturday Morning
One of the books from last week, Tell Me My Story, Mommy, was about a mom telling her little girl the story of when she was pregnant and the little girl's birth. This, of course, generated lots of discussion with Monkey and Bug and requests to hear their story. I was quite proud of myself actually--I managed to turn what was probably the most physically miserable time of my life into a great little story that got lots of giggles and requests for retellings ("We waited . . . and waited . . . and waited, but [Monkey] STILL didn't want to come out! Finally the doctor had to make her come out. . . . You girls were so used to being together that they had to put you into the same tiny bassinette, so you could sleep with your noses this close together.")

Valentine's Day
The girls and I did absolutely nothing to formally acknowledge Valentine's Day. This has much more to do with my own laziness than it does with ideology. They absolutely loved getting their packages from the grandparents, though! The contemporary celebration of Valentine's Day (love & chocolate) is all over the place, but my curious little bunch wasn't satisfied with that: Why do we do Valentine's Day? What does Valentine mean anyway? I briefly explained the story of St. Valentine. Response: So, a pastor was killed because he thought marriage was important and now we eat candy? Um, yeah . . . that does seem strange, doesn't it?

One of the girls' Valentine's Day packages included little craft kits.
Monkey already put her to use to create this little abstract sculpture.

Grocery Store Fun
The girls made a fun game out of the grocery store this week: for every aisle they chose a different animal to imitate. I think my favorite was the jelly fish--watching three giggly little girls "wibble wobble" down the baking aisle was absolutely hilarious.

Also, I seem to be raising real foodies. Thanks to a cheese and cracker platter we put out when we had friends over for dinner a little while back, the girls requested "fancy cheese" for their grocery shopping treat. Mmmm . . . gouda. Bug's personal favorite, though, she informed me, is Havarti. I guess we'll have to look for that next time.

Three Rs
For reading, Monkey worked through a couple of stories and word lists in her text book. I think she really appreciated being back to having phonics clues, and it gave her enough confidence that by the end of the week she said the textbook was boring and asked if we could do a real book. She conquered the first half a dozen pages of Ten Apples Up on Top on Friday. Monkey has finally mastered numbers 1-13! She did worksheets, flashcards, marshmallow math, and the push up game to accomplish this.

For her reading, Bug has continued reading Little Bear stories, and her fluency is definitely improving. For math Bug did some marshmallow math with multiplication at the beginning of the week. Later in the week she asked if we could go back to adding. I think she was hoping for super-easy, but I introduced some new concepts instead: adding two digit numbers (e.g., 10 + 12) by first adding the ones then the tens and adding three numbers together. She was obviously struggling with some of it, but I was so proud of her for persevering through the hard parts without melting down or giving up.

For their writing lessons this week, both big girls made use of paper hearts inscribed with Bible verses about love that their Sunday School teacher gave them. Everyday they'd each pick out a heart to copy out the verse on the white board.

Goose learned the letter D this week through collage projects, worksheets and the magnets on the fridge. She also did marshmallow math and math worksheets dealing with numbers 1-10. She's been able to count to 10 by rote for a long time, but she's actually getting much better at number recognition now.

At the end of the week, I introduced the girls to a fun counting game: hopscotch! Part of our backyard is done with square bricks that are the perfect size and pattern for hopscotch. I also made a "hop to" board for Goose that she really loved: I wrote numbers 1-9 in random order in a square grid, and she had to hop to whatever number I called out.

History Update
I don't think I wrote about it last week, but our history unit about the pioneers continues in the form of daily readings from Little House on the Prairie. The girls are huge fans! (It's the true story of a mom, dad, and three little girls moving West--of course, it's fascinating!) They're learning about living conditions back then (cooking, washing clothes, washing dishes) and things like how to build a log cabin. They were also pretty excited when they realized a local history mural at the art museum included a covered wagon. Now they want to know what our town was like before lots of people moved here. (Fortunately, I discovered a local history museum that I'm hoping will answer all their questions. I guess know where our next field trip is going to be!)

Library Day
This week's storytime theme was cars, trucks, and trains. As usual the girls loved the stories and begged out of participating in most of the get-your-wiggles-out activities--except for when the whole group became one long train and placed a fun stop-and-go game around the storytime room. I also made friends with a couple of other milspouses. Hopefully, we can herd the kids into being friends too! We came home with these books:
The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs
Mouse's First Fall
Chicky Chicky Chook Chook
Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse
Tell Me My Story, Mommy
Hurry up and Slow Down!
Will's Mammoth
The Caterpillow Fight
Good Thing You're Not an Octopus!

Epic Adventures!
Daddy and I watched the movie Epic this weekend, and decided it was must-see viewing for the girls. They LOVED it! (In fact, I've been informed that we need own it, so they can watch it again.) Bug has even figured out that she gets better answers if she saves her "why" questions for after the movie instead of peppering me with them while we watch. The real sign that this story captured their imaginations was the next day when Monkey triumphantly popped into the kitchen with an action figure in hand: "Look, Mommy! Green Lantern looks like a Leaf Man!" He and the girls' fairy dolls, who look a lot like the flower people in the movie, had lots of adventures. At the end of movie I caught the small print noting that the movie was inspired by a picture book by William Joyce. The girls and I were very excited to find it on our library's shelves! It bears very little resemblance to the movie, but it does have Leaf Men and it's a really lovely little book that I suspect I'll be reading frequently until we have to return it.

Playground
We made it to the playground several times this week, and we finally figured out the best time to go. The elementary school bus stop drops kids off right next to the playground, and we discovered a small contingent of neighborhood stay-at-home moms who hang out for a while before heading home. There are a couple of other kindergartners in the bunch. My girls didn't play with them much yet, but at least they saw me making friends with the other moms--that's usually the first step toward making real friends for them.

Being Touristy
This Saturday we decided to visit one of the must-sees in our area, and headed for the wharf. It was a bit wet and blustery, but we had a great time anyway! Between walking along the wharf and shoreline, we spotted otters, sea lions, harbor seals, and several kinds of birds, which we were able to identify using the local wildlife guide I got today. We also stopped to watch salt water taffy being made at the candy store and decided we needed to buy a bag to take home with us after a tasty seafood dinner overlooking the marina. Dinner entertainment included watching a very playful otter and several sea gulls as well as looking up squid on my phone, so the girls would know what animal they were eating.


The girls were very excited about finding this platform full of sea lions! They were particularly amused
by the one sleepingup on the rail (seriously, I would have loved to see how he got up there!).

Daddy explained a little about how sailboats work.

Three Rs
We're all plugging away at the same goals and making good progress:

Monkey finished Hop on Pop, and decided that her reading lessons would be most productive if we went back and forth between her textbook and a real book. Since I was planning to talk her into that plan anyway, I was thrilled to jump on her idea, and she finished out the week reading pages from the text book with slightly more challenging vocabulary, but lots of phonics clues. She also took some initiative with her math lessons. We focused on numbers 9, 11, and 12 this week, then took one day to review and drill these first dozen numbers (Thursdays are super-busy, so I decided to lower my stress level and not even try to do formal lessons that day.) After doing 9 on Monday, she asked if we could "do that number that looks like two 1s next?" because she assured me she knew the number ten, but had trouble remembering eleven. For writing, in addition to some copy work, Monkey really practiced writing her name. The poor kid has kind of a long one, and she really wants to be able to write it all out instead of using her nickname on things like worksheets at church.

Goose learned the letter C this week. She's also taken to pulling letter magnets at random off the fridge and asking me what they are, so I'm hoping more letters are going to just sink in. On Friday while her sisters were copying nursery rhymes (their choice), Goose took one of the nursery rhyme copy pages, and I had her circle the letters we've done in lessons so far (A, B, and C). She continues to be really into math worksheets, and usually does 2 or 3 per day (at which point we've run out of time, but not necessarily her interest). One of the things slowing her down is that she doesn't have the pencil control yet to actually write the numbers herself. I found several worksheets that help her work on that though, by having her trace lines connecting baby animals to mommies, etc.

Bug is still reading the Little Bear book (it's a collection of four stories), but we cut short some of her reading lessons because the poor girl was just coughing so much (fortunately, by the end of the week she was sounding much better). For math, she worked in her addition book, where she can solve most of the problems without using a number line or manipulatives, and practiced using manipulatives to illustrate multiplication problems (she's working with problems from the 2s, 3s, and 4s times tables).

Everybody loves marshmallow math! I gave each girl a bowlful of mini
marshmallows and a small stack of flashcards with instructions to illustrate
the concept on the card with marshmallows (1-5 for Goose, 6-12 for Monkey,
and an assortment of multiplication problems for Bug).

We're enjoying the west coast weather with chalk drawings and picnics in the backyard!

Library Day
The theme for storytime this week was the Chinese New Year and horse stories--this being the year of the horse on the Chinese calendar. The girls were very excited about the "gold" coins in fancy red envelopes they each received on their way out. The girls didn't want to stay long to play because there were so many kids, but we came home with lots of fun books:
Animal Parade
Bravo, Minski
The Voyage Turtle Rex
Weird Parents
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? 
Ten Oni Drummers (Monkey and Bug are learning to count in Japanese for their jujitsu class, so they were pretty excited about finding this one.)
How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?
Old Turtle
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day


Picasso Potato!
We did a quick artist study about Pablo Picasso this week. It began when Monkey creatively rearranged Mr. Potato Head's face. When she gleefully revealed her work, I exclaimed, "It's a Picasso Potato!" Then of course, I had to explain why I said that. We Googled Picasso and had fun perusing his oeuvre: the "little drawings" (his line drawings), "regular paintings" (his blue period), and his "crazied up paintings" (cubism). Monkey was particularly a fan of the vibrant colors used in Picasso's cubism paintings.

Oh, Pioneers!
You can tell we're settling into the new routine--we started a history unit this week. I thought it'd be appropriate to study the westward expansion and the pioneers, since we just finished our own westward migration. We started reading through a Kids Discover magazine about the pioneers and had lots of discussions about the differences between our trip and the trips the pioneers families made a long time ago (cars & a moving truck vs. wagons, 2 weeks vs. 3-5 months, hotels & restaurants vs. camping, etc.)

Kids Club
We found our new church home! Goose is enjoying the preschool class, and making some new friends (particularly D, whose family also attends OCF with us). Monkey and Bug are involved in the Kids Club--Sunday school for kindergarten through fifth graders that's much more rigorous than the kids programs they've been in previously. They're studying the Tabernacle right now, and they came home with a list of scripture passages for us to read and discuss together. When we started adding those to our daily Bible time, I realized the girls have only used Bible storybooks, and I needed to explain how Bible references work. Monkey was particularly fascinated by the system, and spent quite a while flipping through the pages of a real Bible. Based on comments Monkey and Bug made, they're definitely paying attention in class, and their teacher Miss C is really wonderful. They're also working on memorizing Psalm 100.

The Three Rs
We had three stay-at-home days this week, so we had uninterrupted mornings for lessons (that's the new normal here--nice, but it means Thursdays are a bit crazy since library storytime, jujitsu lessons, and OCF all happen that day).

For reading, Bug finished Go, Dog, Go! and read the first Little Bear story. She only has to sound things out occasionally and her reading is getting much more fluent. For math, she's been working on addition (she has a few pages left in her workbook) and multiplication (I finally made a few times table worksheets for her). She also did some Cheerio math alongside Monkey and Goose. For writing, she joined Monkey in copying out their memory verse. We wrote it out on the easel and took turns writing a phrase at a time.

Monkey is almost done with Hop on Pop; she's been doing a great job of sounding words out and adding some sight words. Writing, as I mentioned, involved copying out the memory verse with Bug. Math continues to be a struggle. We did some Cheerio math, where I wrote digits in boxes on a piece of paper out of order and had her fill in the appropriate number of Cheerios. Then I decided to go back and focus on just one problem number per day. Going through the numbers 6-8 this week, she would repeatedly trace each digit and then write it out on her own, then she'd complete a search-and-find page for each number (lots of numbers all jumbled together on a page, she has to circle all of whatever number we're studying that day), and for a final fun reinforcement I decided to capitalize on her interest in art: I printed out a large version of number of the day on a piece of paper and asked her to turn it into artwork that would help her remember each number. She got a real kick out of this project, and they're all displayed on fridge now.

Goose's letter of the week was B. She completed a collage of letters and objects that start with B, completed a butterfly coloring sheet, and cheerfully pointed out Bs whenever she spotted them in books we were reading. Goose has also recently discovered a love for math worksheets. She's been matching up numbers to groups of objects, tracing digits, and doing dot-to-dot pictures.

All three girls have been having lots of fun with the letters and numbers on fridge this week. It's been encouraging to hear them reinforcing in play what we've been going over in lessons.

The girls are really loving having the dresser full of craft
supplies conveniently in the study (instead of in the garage)