Nana's Here!

Nana came to visit for the first part of the week. She helped the girls put together a celebration of my birthday, so they got to go shopping for my birthday presents (Nana let them buy the chocolates and the decorative stepping stone, but vetoed the two-foot-tall ceramic bunny.) They also helped her bake a birthday cake, and it turned out beautifully and delicious! The cake was Bug's idea. At her request Nana found a recipe for "a chocolate cake--one of those round ones with a hole in the middle--with smashed candy canes on top."

The cake in progress . . . and the tasty finished product!

Nana also helped us do a little redecorating in the playroom. Grandma and Granddad had given us a set of books for Christmas that we discovered had wonderful posters in them--colors, shapes, numbers 1-20, and the alphabet. Nana helped us find frames and choose spots to hang them, low enough for the girls to actually enjoy them. We also came home with a little round flower mirror that we hung by the dress up clothes drawer. Goose has spent a fair amount of time on top of the dress up drawer making faces at herself. I have yet to succeed in capturing the cuteness on camera though.

Monkey and Goose admiring a couple of the posters before we hung them.

One evening, I took myself out for dinner and a movie, and the girls had their own dinner and a movie with Nana. They watched the Shirley Temple version of Heidi, which they loved, and of course had to compare to the book and the other version we've watched.

Reading

Monkey's been struggling with reading lessons this week, but at the end of the week, I think I found several things that help: changing the time for her lesson to the morning instead of right after nap time, keeping Bug's lesson after naptime so they're not back-to-back and can't compare themselves as readily, and giving her an encouraging pep talk (pointing out that most 4 year olds aren't learning to read and that there are things that she learns really fast that Bug had to struggle with for a while). We've been focusing on the dozen sounds she knows and on building her sounding out skills.

Bug is really mastering sounding out, and I rarely need to help her anymore. She's been reading a couple of sentences or a list of 6-9 words everyday. By the end of the week she read the first BOB Book all by herself! She's known the sounds involved for awhile now, but this is the first time she's had the confidence to tackle it. She was screaming with excitement when she finished, and she immediately searched out more BOB Books to read. She couldn't actually read every word in the ones she found (I need to dig them all out of the bookshelves again), but she had a blast finding words she could read and even pieced together some words that she didn't know all the sounds of based on context.

Goose can frequently be found on the living room floor all tucked in to "read" a pile of good books.

Math

We've been doing more organized math activities this week. One morning we watched an episode of Blue's Clues that happened to be about recording information with charts. I offered to help the girls make their own, and they excitedly cataloged a wagon load of blocks based on shape and a slew of different objects based on color (blocks, playdough, magnets). Bug and I used dried beans and number note cards to work on understanding the teens (first we lined up 10 beans, then added the appropriate number of beans for each card; Bug's counting skills noticeably improved after this). Monkey wanted to review 1-10 before attempting the teens, so I drew 10-block grids on a couple sheets of paper, labeled each with a number, and had them count out the appropriate number of beans in each block. It's amazing how much fun they had with such a simple activity. By far the favorite math activity of the week was actually working through the M&Ms Count to One Hundred book. This involved counting out 20 M&Ms in 5 different colors, then counting all the way to 100, when they were finally allowed to actually eat a handful of M&Ms.

Making charts . . . Counting beans . . . Playing Starfall.com math games at the upstairs workstation

Library Day

Storytime is back! The theme for this first week back was winter and snow days. Funny, considering she was reading to a shorts-wearing crowd enjoying some unseasonably warm weather. We came home with these books:

Hi, Cat!

I'm Getting a Checkup

No Roses for Harry

Jimmy's Boa and the Bungee Jump Slam Dunk

Red Green Blue: A first book of colors (This book introduces colors using nursery rhyme characters, and includes additional nursery rhyme scenes in the background. The girls and I had a great time finding them all and either quoting or looking up the original rhymes.)

The M&Ms Count to One Hundred

Train of Thought

It's amazing what learning can happen when you're simply willing to follow a kid's train of thought. A tidbit about a "hidden city" (Pompeii), in a non-fiction book they like has led to some great discussions. We discussed archeology, of course, and how the city was buried a long, LONG time ago, but archeologist found it and dug it up. We looked up pictures online. They noticed that the roads looked different (narrow, cobblestones), and we talked about how cars hadn't even been invented when people lived in this city. I think they are finally beginning to get a sense of "a long time ago." They were particularly fascinated by the petrified corpses which led to questions about the nature of death and the soul (the body stays on earth, but we believe the soul--the part of you that thinks and prays--goes to heaven after death), and even got a bit into the theology of salvation (because they wanted to know why/how we get to heaven). Another very different direction the discussion took was an interest in volcanoes. We looked up a section about volcanoes in another book in the Ask Me! series, watched a 20 minute Bill Nye episode about them, looked up photos of additional volcanoes online, and created our own classic baking soda and vinegar volcano. Monkey came up with her own activity and got her sisters to join her in pretending to be lava, exploding out of the volcano tunnel, and spreading out to become new land (this involved taking running leaps off the end of couch and landing to spread themselves out across the floor).