San Diego!
Daddy had this past week off, and we decided to take the entourage to San Diego. These girls have really become amazing travelers! Let's start with the fact that preparing for the trip meant me writing an illustrated packing list on their white board and passing out their individual duffel bags. Monkey and Bug packed their own bags, and Bug (our resident fashionista) helped Goose put her outfits together. I didn't even double check to make sure they had everything before we left (granted, I meant to, but it just didn't happen, and they were fine!) Then they spent the entire day (going and returning) cheerfully entertained in the back seat with a backpack of action figures they packed themselves, a tote bag of magazines and notepads with a baggie of crayons, a trio of magnadoodles, a couple of Spanish DVDs, and their current favorite movie--Mulan. I'm also loving the fact that we've reached the stage where we can travel without the hassle of a stroller or diapers! They are all real troopers about spending most of the days walking around, too. We were able to spend three full days exploring the city, and here are the highlights:

San Diego Zoo: We couldn't possibly visit San Diego without spending a day at the zoo! We started off our visit with a 30 minute tour on a double decker bus--sitting in the open top, of course. Next--and probably even more popular--we took the Skyfari (aerial tram) to the far end of the zoo to get to the animals we wanted to see most. Our top priority animals were the arctic animals and the panda bears since the zoo near our last house didn't have those. We also toured the apes and monkeys exhibits and the big animals (big cats, elephants, hippos, etc.). Of course, the girls spent time climbing on all the statue animals too!

(Left) Our little monkeys watching the zoo monkeys. (Center) The entourage pretending to be polar bear cubs.
(Right) Bug and Goose enjoying the Skyfari! Monkey is in the tram behind them with Daddy.

U.S.S. Midway: We were seriously impressed with our tour of this decommissioned air craft carrier. It featured very well done exhibits of this "floating city" and a flight deck full of sample aircraft from WWII through Desert Storm, some of which we could even enter. It had a family audio tour that Monkey and Bug could listen to as well, and they participated in the Junior Pilot Program--answering about a dozen questions in their booklets as we progressed through the ship and getting their wings pinned on by one of the veterans volunteering at the information desk. Daddy and the big girls took an additional tour of the island to see the bridge and air traffic control. Goose was too short to go, so she and I spent some extra time exploring the aircraft she could board and just running around the flight deck. This stop in San Diego was particularly special to us, because Granddad was a medical officer on board just a few years before it decommissioned. That made it especially fun to tour the sick bay and to see what the officers' racks and mess hall were like.

Little fighter pilots!

(Left) We got to board a troop carrier helicopter. (Top right) Monkey and Bug did the island tour with Daddy and pretended to be air traffic controllers. (Bottom right) Monkey and Bug filled out their worksheets to qualify for their Junior Pilot wings, while Goose looks on.

During the Midway tour we got to see the kind of rack we think Granddad had and one of the medical exam rooms he worked in.

Old Town: We ended up spending 6 hours on the Midway (and could have spent more), so we didn't have as much time to explore Old Town as we would have liked, and unfortunately, we missed most of the historical re-enactors in the "Birthplace of California," the site of the first permanent Spanish settlement in the state. It includes a plaza surrounded by restored historic buildings--some are set up as living history museums and others have been turned into fun little shops and restaurants. We poked around for a while, then had dinner at a nice Mexican place.

SeaWorld: The girls loved SeaWorld! We skipped the touch tank/aquarium pieces, since we have a such an awesome aquarium close to home, but we did lots of rides and shows! The dolphin show actually featured more human acrobats than dolphins, but they did some pretty impressive stunts in fun bird-themed costumes. The sea lions and otters had a tv-show themed comedy show that was quite entertaining. We managed to arrive early enough for the orca show to sit just at the edge of the splash zone--great views. In between catching the shows we spent lots of time in the Sesame Street themed amusement park (three rides plus a huge bounce house and climbing play space). Monkey and Bug were even brave enough to go on the teacup ride all by themselves (unfortunately, they weren't actually strong enough to spin it by themselves, and they decided it's a lot more fun when Mommy or Daddy come too). Monkey and Bug also got to go with Daddy on a helicopter simulation ride (Goose and I joined them in the beluga whale exhibit once they exited) and tube-style rapids ride (Monkey and Bug were less than thrilled with this one because "Daddy told us we'd get wet, but he didn't tell us we'd get super wet!" Apparently, that's an important distinction.) Unfortunately, Goose--our little thrill seeker--is still too short to go on the "big rides"--a source of serious disappointment on several occasions. She even wanted to go on the Manta roller coaster with Daddy!

(Left) The girls watching beluga whales. (Center) Shamu! (Right) The entourage on their favorite ride--the spinning "tea cups."

Miss K! To wrap up our San Diego vacation, we went out to dinner with Miss K, our babysitter from our last duty station who just happens to attend college in San Diego! The girls were pretty excited about sushi and yakisoba followed by ice cream, and Miss K was thrilled to escape cafeteria food for an evening. It was fun to catch up with her, and the girls loved playing with her in the courtyard of the restaurant for a little while.

Greek Fashion
We started off our week with a foray into ancient Greek fashion. We read the appropriate section of the Eye Witness book and perused the book for additional samples. Tradition chitons turned out to be incredibly easy to make! Two rectangles of fabric, a handful of safety pins, a belt and--voila!--outfit complete!

We also read the Eye Witness section about food (while we did feast last Friday, we didn't actually read up on the food specifically). Another day we settled in for a long cozy teatime and read a wide selection of Aesop's fables and Heracles stories. The fables, of course, led to lots of good discussions about what lessons the stories are teaching. We wrapped up our history studies this week by watching the DVD about ancient Greece that we got from the library. It covered a lot of aspects of life in ancient Greece, and the girls got to see video of actual ruins along with replicas and reenactments of things like the Olympic games (not entirely historically accurate as the athletes were, thankfully, fully clothed for the video).

Library Day
The theme for storytime was mysteries, and the books read all involved questions being asked or things not being what they seemed (e.g., It Looked Like Spilled Milk). The girls played cheerfully alongside some other kids afterward and picked out lots of books for us to bring home:
Once There was a Bull . . . Frog
An Edible Alphabet
Are We There Yet, Daddy?
The Queen of France
You're Finally Here!
Lolly-pops
Count Down to Clean Up!
Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend
When the Teddy Bears Came
You're Mean, Lily Jean!
Felix Feels Better
Sumo Mouse
(Note: I very rarely pick out the books to take home now. All three girls have gotten to be pretty excited about picking out their own books. Goose picks things off the shelf at random, but Monkey and Bug seem to have gotten a little more distinguishing in their choices. I've no idea what their criteria is, but not every book that comes off the shelf gets put in our bag now.)

Three Rs
Math for Monkey and Bug involved more work on telling time and simple fractions (they can now add up things like 1/4 + 1/4 = 1/2), and continuing to work on adding multi-digit numbers (they were very excited to discover some Starfall games that work on this skill this week too). I realized some of the Starfall games they were trying to play also involved subtraction, so we did a lesson on that as well. They both grasped the concept pretty quickly (really it's a just a matter of their remembering that "-" means "take away"). Bug is still practicing skip counting and working on memorizing the 5 times table. Goose is still practicing counting through some picture books, worksheets, and just spontaneously counting objects.

For reading the big girls are still having fun picking through our collection of easy readers, and they were thrilled to discover a new Bob book easy reader at the library, which they both read through on Friday. Bug has also really enjoyed reading familiar books to Goose--fun for all! Goose learned the letter H this week and mostly wanted to repeat the activity of thinking up things that start with H and having me draw them on the white board. Monkey and Bug always get in on this too.

To practice writing this week, both girls wanted to answer question pages: Bug wanted to practice Bible quizzing (she did the stories of Moses and Jonah this week), and Monkey wanted to learn about sea animals (conveniently enough, before our visit to the aquarium, so she was feeling very knowledgeable about the jellyfish and octopuses). Monkey also spent some time practicing her name and a few other random words she wanted to spell.

To the Aquarium!
The girls and I spent a fantastic afternoon at the aquarium this week! (That membership card is going to get lots of use.) It's a huge place, so we just focused on a few highlights: We arrived just in time for the Albatross Encounter and got to meet the only albatross living in captivity (she was rescued as a chick after a wing injury). Then we headed to the exhibit about jellyfish to complete a kind of scavenger hunt. The aquarium's website has tons of printable activities; this one had labeled photos of different species of jellyfish for the girls to identify and check off as they found them. The girls could usually do this based on differences in physical details without my having to tell them the species name first.


playing in the tidal pools and climbing into a life-size giant clam

Then we headed for the hands-on kids section that had been too crowded to enter last time we were there. They loved it! They got to climb through "kelp forest" and "coral reef" play spaces that included tiny screens with videos of the kind of creatures that would live there, they played with plastic fish and boats in a "tidal pool" complete with regularly occurring waves and "rocks" they could rearrange to study the affects of the waves, they dressed up in sea life costumes, they made crayon rubbings of pictures of different local species of sea life, listened to the noises of things like seals, dolphins, and whales and tried out the movements of flippers and fins. Before we left we made it to the penguin feeding and Q & A session. In addition to all the typical adult members of the rookery, they had an adolescent penguin who still had her baby feathers and an adult penguin in the process of molting.

A "Life Skills" Day
On Tuesday this week, I decided the girls and I needed to take a mini-break from the usual academics and regroup. Once we finished the usual morning routine, I let the girls bake a batch of brownies, and I really did little more than read them the recipe and supervise--they found all the ingredients and measuring spoons/cups and did all the measuring, dumping, and mixing. Bug even cracked the eggs, and Monkey assisted Goose with running the electric mixer. While those were cooling off, we walked down to the local craft store (can I tell you how excited I am that we can walk there?!), where we perused the shelves for future project ideas and bought the couple of things we'd come in for.

We returned home to consume our brownies and

a pot of tea, while discussing the current state of the entourage's education. We talked about what they're learning now, what they like that we do, what they don't like, how we might improve things, and if they had any particular requests for things they'd like to learn or do. I know they're only 5, 5, and 3, but it's still a productive meeting. Granted Goose mostly enjoyed the fact that I let her eat two brownies right before lunch, but Monkey and Bug had some really good things to contribute. Monkey requested that we do more projects for history again (she's absolutely right; I've been a complete slacker on that front for our unit about the pioneers). Bug asked that we start practicing for Bible quizzing, so she'll feel ready when they're big enough to do that at church (they'll start in the fall). Far be it from me to turn down a kid's request to dig deeper into the Bible! Bug also restated her desire to learn to knit. Then we brainstormed ideas for good writing assignments, reading options, and field trips. Besides teaching them how to evaluate their goals and activities, it's always helpful to get their buy-in for what they're learning.

The afternoon involved actually teaching Bug to knit. She's been begging me to teach her to knit or crochet ever since she received a crochet hook in her Valentine's Day craft kit, but I'd been putting her off until I remembered using knitting looms in my childhood. We purchased one along with some yarn from the craft store that morning, and after a five-minute tutorial she was off!

More of the afternoon was spent on a truly vital life skill: how to clean a bathroom. I usually get the girls to help me, but this time I gave them more of the lead and merely stuck my head in and instructed when necessary. Not much was necessary actually, and they seemed very pleased to take charge of the task themselves.

Library Day
The story time theme this week was weather, and the librarian had a few fun books about rain, rainbows, and wind. The entourage was disappointed though that storytime involved more song-and-dance participation activities than it did actual stories. However, we came home with lots of good books for us:
The Story of Growl
Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?
Princess Furball
Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping
King of the Cats
The Princess and the Pea
A Tooth Fairy's Tale
Daisy 1, 2, 3

Since I was planning to start our new history unit next week, we also looked specifically for books about ancient Greece. We got a confused look from the children's librarian when I inquired about this subject while trailing a couple of kindergarteners and a preschooler, but she was willing to run with it and told me she'd keep an eye out for additional age-appropriate resources. She did help us find several things:
Ancient Greece (30-minute DVD for elementary students)
Ancient Greece Revealed (neat book for seeing into things like warships, houses, and the Trojan horse using partially transparent pages)
The One-eyed Giant and Other Monsters of Ancient Greece (picture book encyclopedia)
The Trojan Horse (picture book version)
The Hero and the Minotaur (picture book that also includes the story of Icarus)

New History Unit: Ancient Greece!
Despite the fact that we still have a few chapters of Little House on the Prairie left and I really wasn't planning to open this up until next week, I bowed to popular demand and agreed to kick off our study of Ancient Greece on Friday. The girls have seen me prepping and they simply couldn't stand the suspense anymore (Why follow-up the pioneers with Ancient Greece? Because Daddy and I let the girls watch Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief with us recently, and they're currently fascinated by the stories of Greek mythology.) I started the day by agreeing to read The Hero and the Minotaur after breakfast. Later we pulled out the poster that came with our Eye Witness book about Ancient Greece and gave the girls an overview of when and where along with tidbits about food, clothing, houses, theater, pottery, and the Olympic games (all topics we'll cover in more detail later). To top it off, I served up a finger-food lunch of things the Greeks would have eaten too: cucumbers, carrots, raisins, dates, figs, olives, cheese, sardines, nuts, pita bread, and baklava. I've been informed that we need to eat like Greeks more often.

The Three Rs
For Monkey and Bug's math this week, I introduced fractions. We went over the basics using halves and quarters, illustrated by a set of fraction bars and construction paper cutouts (then the real life application involved in baking those brownies on Tuesday). I've also seen both girls playing a fractions game on Starfall, and they seem to have a pretty good grasp of the topic. Of course, they also commandeered the paper cutouts and had lots of fun creating abstract designs with them. We continued practicing telling time, which went well with fractions since we discussed quarter past, half past, and quarter til. Both girls also reviewed their addition skills, and Bug practiced skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s.


On the left, we did lessons outside some this week; I drew a clock face and a digital time and had them
draw the hands on the clock, then I wrote a numeric faction and had them color in appropriately.
On the right, Monkey and Bug created designs with the fraction cut outs.

Both girls got into the stack of Uncle N's easy readers this week, and I added a new activity that's somewhere between reading and writing that the girls call "making up their own reading lesson": In addition to the rhyming words they sorted last week, I printed and cut out a set of sight words and other commonly used words, which I spread out in the living room. Then I had them compose sentences using the words. This activity also involved their first ever grammar lesson, which Bug in particular really liked. When she was stumped with where to even begin, I explained that every sentence needs a noun (person, place, or thing) and a verb (being or doing) along with any other words you need to explain whatever you're trying to say. She excitedly sorted out the whole lot into three piles and methodically composed sentences by picking out one word from each of the first two piles and whatever else she needed from the third. Although I explained nouns and verbs to Monkey as well, she was content to go about the assignment more organically--picking out a few words that caught her eye and exchanging them for different ones until she came up with sentences that made sense. As a result of this activity I also now have a list of words the girls have requested I print up for their use next time.

Bug sorts words and composes sentences.

Monkey and Bug have also expressed distinct preferences for how they want to practice writing. Bug has really enjoyed completing fill-in-the-blank nursery rhymes and a set of Bible quizzing practice questions. Monkey is much more interested in writing about personal experiences or books we're reading using writing pages that are half lined and half blank, so there's also room to illustrate her composition. Both girls also did an "information hunt" (which I think Monkey was only really interested in because I let her help me come up with the questions). We came up with a page of questions about animals for the girls to answer, some of which they just knew and some I helped them look up the answers in our animal encyclopedia. (So far, I've managed to work Bible knowledge, history, literature, and science into our "writing" lessons.)

Goose this week has focused on the letter G using some worksheets and a brainstorming page of things that start with G. She's also done worksheets about matching patterns and pencil control. Then of course, she's usually listening in on whatever her sisters are doing.

Growing Their Faith
I think Monkey and Bug recently reached some point of epiphany in their young faith. Prayer and reading Bible stories has long been a part of our daily routine, and we've made sure the girls know that they're true stories--different from fairy tales or your run-of-the-mill picture books. But I think Monkey and Bug realized that these stories are not only true, they're important! I already mentioned Bug's request to practice Bible quizzing, and this week their curiosity about our usual Bible readings really jumped. They've discovered that there's more to the Bible than a Bible storybook--there are different sections and lots of details the storybook versions don't include. For example, one day this week their Little Kid's Bible included an excerpt about "the bad kings of Israel," but it left them hanging on whether the last king mentioned was a good king or a bad king. They had me get out the real Bible, and we spent the next 15 minutes or so reading through generation after generation of the kings of Israel and Judah and finding out which kings worshipped idols and which ones "did what was right in the eyes of the Lord." (It was one of those "this is why I love homeschooling moments": I didn't have to rush them out the door to school; we could just sit on the couch and read the Bible!) The other day I even heard Bug lead them in doing Bible drills. They don't know the books of the Bible yet, but she was racing her sisters to find the Old Testament, New Testament, the section with the prophets, chapter 27 (it didn't matter which book, just any chapter 27 would do apparently), etc. So many times this week I've overheard them spontaneously burst into praise songs--either snippets of songs they remember from church or tunes they make up themselves. Despite my own parenting uncertainties and the occasional really stressful days, this is what tells me Daddy and I are doing something right!

Three Rs
After such an exciting weekend in San Francisco the girls were pretty excited about having some real stay-at-home days at the beginning of this week. They also rediscovered Starfall.com this week and really mastered using a mouse with a desktop instead of the touchpad on one of the netbooks. They were particularly excited about all the math games they could actually really do instead of just randomly guessing their way through them. They've really learned a ton since the last time they got into this site! (Particularly ego-boosting for me is that they mostly gravitated to the activities labeled for 1st graders!) While not "Three R" related, the site also has quite a music selection, and Monkey decided to play DJ and instigated a little dance party for her sisters with a combination of preschool songs and classical music.

For reading, Monkey is back into the reading textbook this week and doing very well. Bug finally pulled through and finished Are You My Mother? At some point she complained about reading lessons being boring, so we brainstormed a bit and came up with some ways to make it more interested. Bug actually remembered the little paper easy readers Uncle N passed down to them, and we decided it might be more motivated for her to read things she could get through in only one or two sittings. I also made a rhyming activity for both of them to work on together that was pretty popular. I typed up and cut out a bunch of rhyming words, scattered them on the living room floor, then asked the girls to sort out the words that rhyme and read them to me.

Goose learned the letter F this week, and her big sisters really jumped in together on that activity too. I introduced it by writing a big F on the white board and asking all three girls to brainstorm things that start with F and I would draw them. They came up with a ton! And Bug even copied them onto a piece of construction paper when Monkey erased the board to create her own art.

 

Goose is still enthusiastically completing counting worksheets for her math lessons (This is something Goose requests, not something I'm making her sit down and do. To be honest, I can't print them up fast enough for her most days!) For the big girls I changed up how we do math lessons a bit (they still do them separately, though). Instead of choosing one math topic and just focusing on that for the lesson that day, I've been choosing two or three topics for each girls and finding really quick activities for each them. They seem to really like the new method and are just soaking it up. They've both been practicing telling time--focusing on o'clocks and half-pasts at this point. I had them both practice making tens ("If I have X, how many more do I need to make 10?"). It turns out Bug already has these all memorized, but Monkey still counts most of them out on the number line. Monkey continues to practice number recognition for teens and tens, did some greater/less than problems, and practiced simple addition. Bug continues working on adding multi-digit number including carries, practiced skip counting by 2, 5, and 10, and worked on multiplication problems for those numbers as well.



For their writing assignments with week, Monkey and Bug wrote/dictated about our trip to San Francisco and books we're reading. Monkey was really into this and did two about Little House on the Prairie with lovely artwork to with them. Bug is more of a perfectionist, who gets stymied when the letters don't work out quite the way she wants them to (for example, they end up backwards or don't fit on the line properly). She decided to practice a few particularly problem letters to work on the first problem, and was (eventually) willing to work with me to come up with creative solutions for the latter.

History
The girls are still loving reading Little House on the Prairie. This week we talked about things like the pioneers having to make their own furniture and not being able to just run to the store for something (Pa went to the store and had to be gone for four days). The Ingalls survived malaria with the help of their neighbors and had several good and bad interactions with the local Native Americans. This week we also indulged in one of the prairie living staples--cornbread with molasses. Very popular! The girls also pulled out our A to Z in the Alamo book this week, and I pointed out that while this happened before Laura was born, it was roughly the same time period of American settlement of the West.

Library Day
This week's storytime theme was books and the library, and the librarian found some really cute ones to share. Although Monkey and Bug still don't participate in the sing-alongs, they do at least now stand up for the opening and closing songs that are the same every week. This week they also decided that the usual crowd wasn't too many kids afterall, and they actually wanted to stay and play a bit. We came home with these books:
Rhinos Play Soccer
Let's Make Rabbits
Ten Puppies
The Lollipop Caper
Elephants Never Forget
Anansi and the Talking Melons
Magic in the Mist
Can I Keep Him?

Church Workday
This Saturday was a church workday with lots of indoors and outdoors cleaning and maintenance to get done. Fortunately, this was a kid-friendly event, and our girls plus their best friend K3 jumped right in to scrub floor boards, doorways, tables, chairs, and glass doors as high as they could reach with diluted vinegar. Bug also contributed by helping Daddy run cables through a tight space in the sanctuary. After all that we ran out of jobs for little ones, and they spent the rest of the time running around the church campus with the other kids, picking flowers, finding pretty rocks and cool bugs, and finishing up the morning with a picnic lunch provided by some of the other ladies.

We also met up with a big group of other homeschoolers at the
playground this week. The girls made a few new friends, and
had fun building mountains in the wood chips.

San Francisco!
We decided to take advantage of our west coast location and Daddy's 3-day weekend schedule to make a trip to a city none of us have visited before. We managed to pack in a lot of fun!

Driving around town: We spent some time just driving around and taking in the city--steep hills (so exciting for the 5 and under set!), cable cars and trolleys, fancy houses, murals (especially in Haight-Ashbury), and of course, the Golden Gate Bridge. Sadly, it was a drizzly foggy weekend, so we didn't get a single good photo op of the bridge. However, it was pretty cool to drive over it and see the bridge towers just disappear into the clouds.

Exploratorium: This was an awesome, if rather crowded, science museum with hands on exhibits about magnets, electricity, light and colors, sound, weather, optical illusions, plants, cell biology, seashells--really the list is practically endless, and we had a blast dashing from one station to the next.

At left: Monkey and Goose play with magnets and a tube filled with water and iron filings.
At top: The entourage works with a little boy to turn the floating beach ball exhibit into a cannon.
(they discovered that if you tip the air stream at just the right angle it sends the ball shooting across the room)
At bottom: They loved dancing with the multi-colored shadows!

Marine's Memorial Club: This was actually the hotel we stayed in, but it proved an attraction all by itself. Both the lobby and the hotel library feature display cases full of military memorabilia--uniforms from different eras, model planes and tanks, MacArthur's corn cob pipe, etc.

Alcatraz: The girls were pretty excited about just getting to this destination since the journey involved a boat ride across the bay. We watched a short film about the island's history--it went from being a military post guarding the bay to a federal prison, then was briefly occupied by Native Americans after the prison closed. We toured the cellhouse and surrounding buildings and learned about both the prisoners and the families who lived on the island (Did you know about 60 guards brought their families with them to live on the island? The 75 kids or so took the ferry across the bay everyday to go to school.)

Left: Everybody enjoyed the boat ride to Alcatraz.
Right: Once on the island Bug studies a furnished cell.

Pier 39: Around lunchtime on Saturday, we strolled around Pier 39--lots of fun little shops and a few street performers--and stopped at one of the seafood restaurants along the pier for clam chowder and calamari.

standing under the Dragon Gate
 

Chinatown: This was probably the girls favorite destination (in fact, Monkey told me we should move to San Francisco someday, so we can go to Chinatown all the time). The girls loved poking around in all the shops full of trinkets, and Monkey and Bug each purchased an ornate little box for keeping their baby teeth in. (Bug has a marginally loose tooth, and informed me months ago that when her teeth fell out she wanted to keep them in a fancy box. We realized Chinatown was probably the ideal place to find that.) We stopped in at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory--a bit hard to find, but totally worth the search! We got to watch them filling and folding fortune cookies, grab a handful of still warm, broken ones they gave out as samples, and decided to buy a couple of bags to take with us. Yum! Of course, we had to eat dinner in Chinatown too. The highlight at dinner was probably the tanks full of live fish, crabs, and lobster. Our girls definitely have a healthy sense of where their food comes from: when I explained that the animals weren't here as pets but as future dinners, Bug leaned forward to get on eye level with a fish, pointed a finger, and grinned, "You are tasty!"

Computer History Museum: We made a detour to San Jose
to visit this fascinating museum near Google's campus. We arrived just in time to see a demonstration of the world's only working Babbage Difference Engine (a mechanical computer designed during the Victorian era). Monkey and Bug were fascinated and as expected had tons of questions: "It doesn't have a screen. How do you see what you're doing?" "How do you tell it what to do?" "What's that part do?" etc. From there we toured the main exhibit that covered 2000 years of computing history (from abacuses to Watson). Daddy helped the girls grasp the progress being made by comparing sizes throughout the exhibit; for example, vacuum tubes the size of the girls' stacked fists shrank to transistors the size of their pinkies, etc. They really enjoyed a wall display with a bunch of robots and descriptions of what they could do; then at the end we visited the gift shop and they got to play with robot bugs! There were some funny moments too--like when we had to explain to the girls that phones used to be connected to a wall with a wire and they were only for talking. This was practically incomprehensible to our little techies.

Left: Monkey and Bug with the Babbage Difference Engine (Please note: they only look unhappy because I asked them to pause their study of the machine to take a picture. I did not make this mistake again.) Center: Doesn't everyone teach their kindergartners about logic gates? Right: The girls got to climb inside a GoogleMaps car (Goose is in there too).

Library Day

(Nothing to do with the library,
just too cute) Goose decided
to play milliner this week
and designed these hats for
herself and Monkey.

This week's story time theme was dinosaurs! The crowd was pretty excited! The librarian even brought along her T-rex puppet to join in the fun. There really was quite a crowd this week, so the girls didn't want to hang around long. We picked out some great books before we left though:
Angelina Ballerina
Spot Goes to a Party
The Girl on the High Diving Horse
Nora's Stars
Traction Man is Here!
I Have a Little Problem, said the Bear
Dust Devil (a pioneer era tall tale)
Frank was a Monster who Wanted to Dance
Boris and the Snoozebox
Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
Can You Do This, Old Badger?

Three Rs
Goose just did a weeklong review session of the letters we've covered so far: A, B, C, D, and E. She did some coloring sheets and played a couple of matching games--matching letters to appropriate objects and matching upper and lower case letters. She also did a number of counting worksheets and several worksheets that practice pencil control. Her sisters have even been noticing her improvement in coloring inside the lines (I think I overheard Bug giving her lessons in technique at some point).

Monkey finished Ten Apples up on Top! this week. She was quite excited about conquering another book. For math this week, she joined Bug for a lesson on place value, and she reviewed the numbers 10-19 (knowing them out of order, and understanding that each number is 10 plus however many) and she worked on counting by 10s (being able to identify them out of order and understanding that each number is however many 10s). Once she had a working understanding of those concepts, I introduced greater than/less than problems, which she completely beautifully. And of course, we also practiced some simple addition (sums less than 10). For writing she practiced her whole name, did a little copywork, and completed a research project (more on that in a bit).

Bug continued reading Are You My Mother? The number of pages she read per day slowed to my acceptable minimum, but she's continued reading almost all the words the fast way. I also overheard her reading books to Goose this weekend (reading by herself for fun! Hooray!) For math, we formally reviewed place value (she was getting flustered with her addition problems, so we took a deep breath and a small step back, and pulled Monkey in for the lesson too). The review definitely helped solidify her ability to do double digit addition, and I even gave her the opportunity to add a couple of 7-digit numbers together (it didn't involve any carries). Conquering such a HUGE problem was quite the confidence booster! I also covered the concept of carrying the 1, which proved to be rather enlightening for her since one of the things throwing her off was that she had to add the ones place first when we do everything else from left to right--it just seemed backwards! Once I explained why we have to do that, it became much easier for her to remember. She also did a bunch of greater than/less than problems ("Those are easy-peasy!" she says).

I used bundled toothpicks and loose toothpicks to help illustrate
tens and ones, when we discussed place value. After the math
lesson though, the girls commandeered them for more creative play.
Here, Monkey experimented with some geometric designs.

Bug used the toothpicks to "draw" the Ingalls' house from our
history lessons. It even included the chimney and the well. The
colorful structure off to the side is her Lego version of their house.

Research
This week I introduced the idea of doing a research project. We talked about what "research" means: choosing a topic and finding out more about it. Then I had them brainstorm ways they could do that: look it up in one of our books, find books at the library, look it up on the Internet, and study it in real life at a zoo, aquarium, or museum. Then we talked about the next step--putting what they found in a format they could show to other people. For a quick and easy first project, I had them each choose an animal and decided we'd limit our researching to looking it up in our animal encyclopedia (so of course, we talked about what an encyclopedia is and how one would find a topic in it). Here are the finished projects:

Monkey's is on top, and Bug's is on the bottom.
(They just dictated the actual report.)

 

Miss Independence
Some social/emotional switch must have flipped in Monkey and Bug's brains recently, because they both made some major progress in confidence and independence in the past week: Last Sunday they joined Daddy and I at the front of the church when we officially joined and they willingly shook hands and introduced themselves in the reception line. On Wednesday, they actually jumped in for the song and dance part of the kids program at church! (It helped considerably that I finally managed to get us there a few minutes early, so it was relatively quiet and uncrowded when they arrived.) On Thursday, they excitedly told me that they finally had a chance to make friends with another little girl in their jujitsu class--they even found out her name and had a chance to play some kind of racing game (I think that's probably the first time they've managed introductions without adult guidance!). During our trip this weekend (I'll do a post on that later), they appropriately responded to strangers on the elevator, interacted with wait staff on several occasions (they ordered their own food and even said "No, thank you," "Yes, sir," etc. as called for). On several occasions at a museum and a playground, they even played cheerfully with kids they'd never met before. Considering that several years ago they would routinely burst into tears when spoken to by an unfamiliar person, this is pretty amazing, and I am so excited for them!

Goose's most recent step to being a big girl is that we've ditched the paci entirely. For a long time she's only used it for naps and nighttime, but this weekend we accidently left town without one (I swear it really was unintentional.). She did amazingly well without it (only one meltdown at bedtime), so we decided to stick with no paci when we got home. No diapers and no pacifiers! It's the beginning of a whole new era for entourage!