Grandma & Granddad's House!
We got to have a lovely long weekend with Grandma, Granddad, and Uncle N this week! We arrived Friday evening and went to straight to Uncle N's school to watch him play his trumpet in the pep band for a girl's basketball team. The entourage has played with basketballs before, but they've never seen anyone actually play the game. I explained the very basics of the rules, and Monkey and Bug watched for a little while, but Goose was just enthralled. She even stood up on the top bleacher to get a better view. Hearing the band play a few times was definitely the highlight; although Monkey did cover her ears until she adjusted to the noise level.

Saturday morning we went to the local science center. The temporary exhibit was perfect--all about the passage of time, a topic the girls and I have been discussing recently. Many of the stations were over their heads, but they learned about how things and people change when they get older, the seasons, how plants grow and move, and larger scale things like continental drift. They got to watch some time lapse photography and create some slow motion videos to watch water splashing and little plastic balls bouncing around. Revisiting the permanent exhibit was fun too because Monkey and Bug were much more able to do and understand things this time around. The center has a moving model of the orbits of the sun, moon, and earth, which the entourage found particularly interesting. Monkey and Bug were also able to form hypotheses about the exhibits with balls on ramps and had a great time repeating the experiment to see if it worked every time. They played in the preschool section for a while too before we left, which Goose loved--massive Legos, puppets, costumes, etc. Goose spent a long time wearing a frog hoodie, holding a frog puppet, and jumping around saying, "Ribbit! Ribbit!" 

That afternoon we went for a walk to see Grandma and Granddad's new pond and take a short hike through the woods. Highlights were finding a HUGE oak leaf, seeing a pair of mallard ducks on the river, digging up some mole hills, and spotting three big, beautiful goldfish in the pond (one of whom ate a "live, still jiggling worm" while we were watching). I didn't bring my camera, so the Monkey and Bug took the opportunity to draw pictures of their favorites parts in our nature journal and dictate a brief description for me to write. 

Sunday meant church in the morning and lots of time to play with family in the afternoon. Monday we had a successful trip to a used bookstore. (I've been wanting more big, colorful non-fiction books for our home library, and we came away with some great finds.) We also made Valentines! Grandma had quite a collection of doilies, paper, stickers, etc. assembled, and they made some great ones for our neighborhood friends and one for Daddy that he'll just have to get belatedly. Tuesday was spent driving home, and I have some great little travellers!

Library Day
The storytime theme this week was books by Audrey Wood (such a fun author!). We even watched a "book on video" of The Napping House, always a favorite. The craft was completely unrelated: The girls made Valentines by gluing bits of torn construction paper to fill in a heart shape with the caption "I love you to pieces." Somewhat uncharacteristically it was Monkey who really got into this and methodically covered every spot of the heart. Bug and Goose got distracted by friends who attended storytime this week and went across the room to socialize instead. We came home with these books:
Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
Billy and Blaze
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
Volcanoes
Anno's Counting Book
5 Busy Ducklings

Reading
Bug has officially added the sounds l, w, and u as in fun to her repertoire, but she's also discovering that she does actually know additional letter sounds. She's very quickly gaining fluency and doesn't have to slowly sound out every word before reading it quickly. I even dug up some hand-me-down phonics readers, which she's been perusing and sorting out which ones she can actually read already. She actually sat me down and read a little 10-page booklet with assistance only for the sounds she hadn't been taught yet.

Monkey continues to love the new methods for her lessons. She's officially added o as in otter, and she's used the coloring/tracing sheets to review some of the letters she already knows. We've also done a couple of sight reading exercises in which we picked out a couple of key words that she read throughout the chosen storybook. One evening while we were getting ready for bed, she had one of the books to herself and was going through the title saying each word and then sounding it out slowly and pointing, noting which letter made which sound in the word. She even pointed out to me which letters were also in hers, Bug's, and Goose's names. Basically, she's learning phonics backwards. 

Math
The favorite math "activity" this week was Anno's Counting Book, a beautifully illustrated book that watches a village grow through the seasons. Each spread features a different number 1-12, and the girls had a great time finding all the items of the appropriate number for the page. I also made Bug and Monkey each a "counting page," a 100-block grid with enough space in each square for a small manipulative (so far at their request we've used Cheerios and Frosted Flakes--we're very into edible math). I've used them to practice counting and review the concept of ones and tens. I think place value has actually clicked for them, and they're definitely getting better at counting to 20 accurately. Bug continues to help Goose count to 10, of course.

Math lesson completed, what happened next was very typical of them: Bug continued meticulously placing Cheerios in boxes, while Monkey crunched up a fist of flakes and said, "Look, Mommy! It's like snow!"

We also decided to do a measuring session this week. This time I took out a sheet of paper to record our findings, which the girls loved. They got to practice identifying numbers, then comparing them at the end when I had them look at our list and tell me which items were smallest and biggest and which two items were the same length.

Color Experiment
We bought a new set of tempera paints and a couple of cheap plastic palettes at Walmart this week, and one morning Bug and Monkey sat down to do what they called a "color experiment." I gave them each blobs of the primary colors and explained that using these they could they could make any color they wanted. They spent a good while just mixing paints before I pulled out the paper. I gave Goose a piece of paper and just one color at a time, and her big sisters got the task of "teaching Goose" about colors by listing everything they could think of that was usually whatever color she was currently painting with.