Library Day
Showing up at the library was particularly exciting this week since three of the girls' neighborhood friends (and their moms, of course) were also attending. The theme for storytime this week was colors and featured two of our favorite books: Pete the Cat and Three White Mice. The craft was also popular: The girls each wrote their name on a piece of construction paper (well, Monkey wrote the shortened version of her name and Goose just scribbled, but she insisted on doing it herself). Then they covered over the markered letters with foamy shape stickers in a variety of colors. We came home with these books:
Little Mouse's First Valentine
Hansel and Gretel
Katie Loves the Kittens
5 Busy Ducks (Milestone: This is the first time Goose picked out a book to take home!)
Giraffes Can't Dance
My Dinosaur

Experiments in Reading Lessons
While the new time for Monkey's reading lessons did seem to help, she still seemed to have come to a standstill and was getting farther and farther behind Bug--a source of much frustration for her. It occurred to me (finally!) that one of the reasons we wanted to homeschool in the first place was so we could tailor each kid's education to their own learning styles and interests. So why exactly was I making Monkey persist in this program that wasn't working for her? I sat down and really thought through Monkey's personality and preferences related to learning, and realized it should have come as no surprise that what worked for analytical, left-brained Bug wasn't going to cut it for kinesthetic, right-brained Monkey.

I did some online research about right-brained learners and came up with a new plan and new expectations. I am not abandoning the book outright because I like how it presents concepts and I really feel phonics-based reading is important. However, we're making the following adjustments: Every new sound will be introduced with coloring and tracing sheets from this awesome website (First School). We already tried this out with much success by using a half dozen sheets over a couple of days to review a sound she's been struggling to remember. I have abandoned the tasks of getting her to read seemingly random lists of words, which she always rebelled against ("I want sentences, Mommy!" That desire lines up exactly to everything I read about right-brained learners seeking significance in everything. Bug on the other hand is highly motivated by seeing how many she can read all by herself and could care less what they mean.). We have kept the tasks for reading rhyming words and sentences made from sounds that have already been introduced, but now instead of just reading them out of the book, she can trace them while she reads them thanks to handwriting sheets I've creating using this website (HandWritingWorksheets.com/). I've also added two new activities (note that I just pick a couple of activities for each days lesson). I made both Monkey and Bug Word Books, a blank book with the pages labelled alphabetically. Whenever they think of a word they can or want to be able to read, they write it in the book under the appropriate initial letter, asking for help with spelling as necessary. They love these books! Monkey wanted to watch me write the first few words she thought of, but then she took over because it just looked like so much fun. Zoe even managed to piece together how to spell words that involved sounds that she hasn't formally learned in lessons yet.The other activity is just a Monkey thing, but Bug listened too. I had Monkey pick out a book she wanted to know and told her I'd help her learn it. I had anticipating endless rereadings of some sing-songy book, but that wasn't at all what she had in mind. She picked out a Richard Scarry's book and had me read a phrase at a time while underlining each word with my finger, then she repeated the phrase underlining the words with her finger. She LOVED this. I figure either she'll gradually figure out the patterns of reading with the help of the phonics-based worksheets I'm having her do, or she'll just eventually memorize by sight every word in the English language. Either way, she's now excited about her lessons and she will eventually be reading on her own!

Bug is still cheerfully plugging away at the book and really gaining fluency quickly. She's also starting to pick out words in ordinary books that she realizes she can read all by herself! Very exciting!

Math
The girls continue to spend lots of time playing Starfall math. I've seen them playing games involving counting (both focused on the teens and counting to 100), greater than/less than problems, and addition and subtraction equations. We played with our own hands-on manipulatives too, of course. Bug pulled out the yardstick at some point and spent a good amount of time collecting objects to measure and finding particular joy in discovering items of the same length. The favorite activity this week--repeated a couple of times--was marshmallow math. I made two different worksheets with four addition problems on each page, involving numbers 1-5. Thanks to Starfall they know what + and = mean, so I didn't actually have to teach that. Each numeral was in a box, and I had them fill in the appropriate number of marshmallows and figure out how many went in what Bug called the "Secret Box" after the equal sign. When they finished their sheet, they could eat a few marshmallows, of course.

Goose's Lessons
I don't do formal lessons with Goose--she's only just 2 after all. However, Monkey and Bug have taken it upon themselves. Bug usually teaches her math and recently informed me that Goose is getting better at counting to 10, but she still needs to work on it. Monkey has been teaching her nursery rhymes by sitting on the couch with the book and "reading" to her, having Goose repeat them after her one word at a time, and acting them out for her. They've both been teaching her what different objects are made of and which ones she has to be careful with.

Coloring
They've all been doing lots of coloring recently. Some coloring book pages, but mostly just blank paper--really, I think we may have gone through close to half a ream of paper. I'm surprised our markers haven't gone dry yet! Goose's still look mostly like scribbling, but sometimes she tells me what she's drawing and she frequently does pre-writing scribbling--a series of very small lines and loops across a page. Monkey and Bug are both getting significantly better at drawing recognizable, more detailed images.