In addition to all the usual activities and visits with family, July also involved another round of swimming lessons and our church’s Vacation Bible School program.

This session of swimming has been fantastic. Advantage of going to a lovely, small Y: Lion has a private lesson for the cost of a class because she’s the only one who signed up for her age and skill level, and Bug also had mostly private lessons because the one other child in her level switched to a different time slot. Even Monkey's class only had three kids! The extra time and attention clearly paid off: All three girls made obvious progress, and they were each promoted to the next level at the end! This session, Bug was thrilled to be in a class in the big pool for the first time: she swam laps, learned to use the diving blocks, and played wet ball (it resembles water polo). Monkey repeated the same level, because she didn’t think she had the endurance to swim real laps yet. She does now! (This time around she was clearly the best swimmer in her class, which gave her an extra boost of confidence. She’s always been our most hesitant swimmer, so this is a big deal.) Lion's swimming skills took off as well. Like her sisters, she was working on front and back stroke and was introduced to breast and side stroke. This time around she discovered the perks of having a teenage boy for an instructor: things like splashing contests and getting flung into the pool.

Swimming lessons here even involve some boat safety time.

The girls loved their first vacation Bible school experience! This church does VBS in the evenings, feeds the kids dinner, and draws in significantly more kids than are actually members of our little church. The girls were thrilled to get to hang out with their friends, do crafts, learn new songs, and listen to Bible stories every night last week. I volunteered in the kitchen and had a great time getting to know some of the other ladies at church. In the meantime, the girls had a blast getting an extra 45 minutes on the playground while we prepped dinner.

Busy Girls!

Life is so busy I'm behind in my blogging! This post covers all the tidbits of fun things we've been up to. I'm in the midst of writing up posts about big things (VBS & swimming lessons) and visits with family. They'll be up eventually. Bear with me.

We are harvesting! The girls have been watching things ripen with great anticipation, and we’ve picked (and eaten) peppers, tomatoes, and lots of cucumbers. Of course, we’ve also been checking the rain gauge and watering as needed (not much actually).

We happened to stop by the library at the right time last week and caught Game Day. The girls got to join a bunch of other kids to play with sidewalk chalk, jump ropes, bubbles, and balls on the library patio. (The girls have outgrown story time, but we’re still at the library at least once a week.)

Recently the girls have been interested in special effects for live action movies. This actually started because Bug had a bad dream related to some intense scenes in a superhero movie we watched with them. We decided the best cure was deconstruction. A few of our DVDs offered behind-the-scenes special features (how Hogwarts magical creatures are made), and YouTube had plenty of footage to offer for some of the Avengers movies (they learned about motion capture, CGI, stunt doubles, wire work, etc.). Fascinating stuff!

The whole family recently learned how to make paper cranes. Our church will be hosting a 9/11 memorial service this year, and part of the event will be an art installation involving about 3,000 paper cranes that the congregation has been called on to help create. The girls enthusiastically attended the workshop after church one week, and we took a stack of origami paper home with us. We’ve returned one grocery bag full of tiny cranes so far.

We’ve had a couple of fun insect sightings lately! On one of our outside lesson days, the local ant population discovered the remnants of our mid-morning snack, and we got to witness four ants working together to move a rather large crumb of cheese across the gazebo. Later one of the girls spotting an impressive cicada exoskeleton on our front sidewalk. Of course, since they couldn’t identify it immediately we pulled out the field guide and learned all about cicadas. We’ve added the exoskeleton to our nature collection for further examination.

We’ve discovered the local Y steps up their Child Watch program during the summer and provides additional fun activities for school-age kids in a program called Fit Kids. So far they’ve joined other kids in painting (and glittering), beading bracelets, swimming, and running races on the indoor track. They’re also still attending and loving the once-a-week kids’ yoga class. 

The girls are thrilled that the music room is complete! We even have seating for visitors to listen. They've been loving the new rug. With its coziness just steps away from the study, it's become a popular location for lessons, since they can grab their binders and sprawl out in comfort.

Standardized Testing

The girls were excited to discover
that our local Kroger has kid-sized
shopping carts--not toddler carts,
but ones that can actually hold all
our groceries. I just had to
handle the list!

We survived our first experience with standardized testing, and everybody passed! We had a few teary moments (the idea that they weren't expected to know every question was difficult for them grasp, and Monkey ran out of the time in most of the language arts sections). I'm still not a huge fan of standardized tests in general, but the legal hoop has been successfully jumped through.

Lion wasn't actually required to take them, but I was curious about where she would fall. She's been casually doing kindergarten work, but is technically too young to have completed kindergarten. With these scores though, she's definitely cleared for first grade if she's up for the challenge!

So what does an over-achieving 7 year old (Bug) do after spending a morning testing? Work on learning a new language and inform her mother that she really needs to learn about Shakespeare! (So she can understand the literary references in the book she's reading.) Fortunately, I found Charles Lamb's retelling of Shakespeare's plays as stories for children. As I write, she's curled up in the reading nook with "The Winter's Tale," a play that was prominently featured in a novel she was reading. The day of testing she watched a Spanish-language DVD from the library to help with her pronunciation. She's since decided she wants to pursue learning the language a little more seriously. We've added it to her daily assignment sheet, and she's been working her way through alphabet-based worksheets practicing vocabulary and pronunciation.

Music
Monkey has finally officially warmed up to her drum teacher! I actually heard them laughing together about something the other day. We've continued to set a timer for her daily drum practice, so she can build up her endurance and have more fun playing for longer stretches.

Lion is cheerfully plugging along with her lessons. She loves her teacher and continues making good progress.

Bug has recently expressed an interest in switching back to primarily playing violin. The piano wasn't proving challenging enough to keep her cheerfully interested. We stepped it up a little by requesting her piano teacher add music theory to her lessons. I also discovered her teacher had only been teaching her songs by numbered fingers, not by actually teaching her to read music. I'm sure she would have gotten to it eventually, but Bug was ready for the additional info now. Bug, Daddy, and I discussed the possibility of switching her formal lessons back to violin (as soon as next month) and encouraging her to continue studying piano on her own for awhile.

Just Keep Running
Running isn't just a casual hobby for Lion. This child needs to run. Daddy hadn't been able to take her for several weeks, and she was starting to run in circles through the downstairs on a daily basis. A time or two I actually made her put her running shoes on and take a lap or two around the outside of the house. Once she came back in cheering that she "won the race!" Funny little kid.

This week Daddy finally had time to take her out, and he took her to a track to run intervals for the first time (that's training by running very intense short distances). Since our current location is severely lacking in hills, Lion was interested in a new form of running challenge, and she loved it!

Science
Science is one subject that doesn't really get recorded anywhere else, because I don't do formal science lessons at this point. We've always encouraged the girls curiosity and answered their questions about the world around them as accurately as possible (thank you, Google!). With this lifestyle of exploration, we've so far easily crossed off all the science standards for their grades (Monkey actually aced that section of the test)!

Recently, we've discussed bees and the part they play in pollination, the classification and usefulness of spiders, how seeds form, identifying local birds and using a field guide, the differing needs of various plants (shade vs. full sun, enough room, etc.), characteristics of birds vs. mammals, etc.

And, of course, we're checking regularly on our hands-on science project:

Baby cucumbers! Baby peppers! Baby tomatoes!

Happy Independence Day!
We continued our tradition of having a "patriotic" breakfast: watermelon stars and red, white, and blue yogurt parfaits. This year the girls were responsible enough to really help prepare it, too. I sliced the watermelon, but they cut out the stars with a cookie cutter, washed the blueberries and strawberries, cut the leaves off the strawberries and assembled the parfaits. We missed out on fireworks the last couple of years on the drought-stricken West Coast, so we were really hoping to see some this year. The open field behind our house seemed like a prime viewing location. Unfortunately, the trees that surround it proved just a little too tall, and we only saw a few.