Birthday Party!
This past Saturday we wished our friend A a happy 3rd birthday by joining her and lots of other friends at a bouncy house gym. Fortunately, we were among the first people to arrive, so the girls were able to start exploring before it got too crowded and noisy. Monkey and Bug quickly joined their friend LA in doing infinite laps up and down the slide. Their favorite feature though was probably the obstacle course. Goose, somewhat surprisingly, decided she was intimidated by the big bouncy stuff and stuck to climbing around the foamy baby/toddler area. It did eventually get to be overstimulating for Bug, but she found a good coping mechanism: every 15 minutes or so she'd run to me to be picked up and bury her face in my shoulder for a few moments before returning to play. She and Monkey also figured out that the rest of the kids tended to travel in small herds, which meant there was almost always a bouncy house with no occupants that they could have to themselves for at least a little while.

Library Day
Another quiet day at the library. We actually kept most of our books from last week because either we hadn't finished reading them or they were so good that we wanted to have them to read for another week. I might have skipped the library visit entirely, except that we needed to return a movie, and of course, we can hardly visit the library without getting more books! We added these to our stack this week:
Dancing Harriet
Peep!
Fancy Nancy Explorer Extraordinaire (she goes backyard exploring mostly to find and observe bugs)
Eats

Lessons
Monkey and Bug have firmly established their preferences for having individual reading and math lessons (so much for my idea that having twins would make things simpler by requiring less lesson planning). Monkey likes to do hers first thing in the morning when she's fresh, and she's a very hands-on learner who requires that all lessons have significance beyond just improving her skills (real books, not word lists, for reading; and lots of manipulatives for math). Bug prefers her lessons immediately after quiet time when Goose is (hopefully) still sleeping and Monkey is still engrossed in whatever her quiet time activity was. She likes her lessons to follow an orderly sequence and is motivated by seeing how far she's come and what fun/challenging activities are coming up next (she's a textbook and worksheet girl at this point).

Monkey likes to have lots of input into what the day's lessons will be (which means sometimes I just wing it, and sometimes I manage to have a stockpile of options for her to choose from). During her reading lessons this week, she wanted to: learn how to spell/read food words (we made a number of new entries in her word book), learn more about giraffes and human anatomy (we read an entry in the Animal Encyclopedea and several entries in a kids' body book by repetition), and write a story about knights (she dictated a story about a knight who fell off his horse in a joust but got up again to keep fighting; I wrote it down in her composition book for her trace over the letters). For her math lessons, measuring things is definitely her favorite activity, so we did that a lot this week. The yardstick certainly seems to serve as a more meaningful number line, and she's been working on recognizing numerals on sight (instead of having to count up to the number to tell me what it is). We also played what I call 20 card pick-up: I toss notecards with numbers 1-20 written on them out onto the living room floor, and she puts them back in the right order, a task she can complete now with minimal assistance. On the day she was interested in food words, we also found a math worksheet she wanted to do that involved counting up the different foods pictured and recording the total using tally marks.

Bug continues to cheerfully follow the textbook for reading and her math workbook. She's now just over halfway through the reading book, and she read lots of individual words and an entire story without dots under individual sounds! This was a huge triumph. At first she didn't think she'd be up for reading the whole story, and we agreed upon a stopping point about halfway through. However, once we got to that point, she just couldn't bear the suspense of unanswered questions and ended up finishing it anyway. She didn't add any new sounds this week, but she asked for coloring sheets to review sounds she had learned recently. She usually does two or three math worksheets every day (I require one, but she's usually having too much fun to stop, and I'm not going to make her quit!). She's been improving her writing of numerals, but occasionally has to refer back to previous pages to review how to do them. Search-and-find pages continue to be her favorite pages, and she usually has me add more blanks for objects the book didn't actually ask her to count. She encountered a new kind of worksheet this week that listed a number alongside a row of a few objects with instructions to draw in however many more of the objects were needed. She was intimidated by the drawing part, so I offered to do that for her if she told me how many (we had a good laugh at some of my misshapen fruits; I'm hoping that will give her confidence to try herself next time, if even I can't draw them perfectly). She was struggling with the math concept, but I showed her how to solve it using a number line. She understood immediately and did a great job. 

Knights in Shining Armor
We did remember to look at the stained glass windows at church on Sunday, and the girls had great fun dashing from one window to the next trying to figure out what story was being depicted.

We finally cracked open The Knight's Handbook this week, and we read about arms and armor, tournaments, heraldry, the defensive architecture of castles (walls, towers, moats, etc.), and things knights did when they weren't fighting (dancing, hunting, playing games). We haven't finished the book, but we covered a lot this week! To accompany the reading, we watched the tournament clips from A Knight's Tale (hardly a historically accurate film, I know, but we own it, and it gave the girls a much better understanding of jousting and heraldry), turned their Roman shields into Medieval shields by cutting them down and creating the girls' own heraldic signs, made a helmet out of posterboard, and dug through the toy bins for all the knights and their accessories (we have a lot more than I remembered, and they managed to enact whole battles--although we ran out of horses, so they had to travel to battlefields in Safari jeeps and a trailer pulled by a rhinoceros instead).

My knights with their heraldic shields: (l to r) Goose with a monkey, Bug with a zebra, and  Monkey with a Jaguar.

I tried to get a photo of Monkey arrayed in this helmet, her shield, and a Boomwhacker lance atop the rocking horse.
Unfortunatley, she wasn't up for photos, but I did get this shot of her helping Goose get the helmet on straight.

At Bug's insistence we also talked about Medieval books (she had spotted the new craft supplies required for the hands-on fun to go with that study). Thanks to the Eyewitness book and an art history book we happen to have on our shelves, we were able to pore over images of the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and an assortment of illuminated pages. Then we broke out the markers, adhesive "jewels," posterboard, and illuminated coloring pages to create our own gorgeous reproductions. The girls decided people ought to start making such fancy books again.

Monkey engrossed in her fancy Medieval book and a close-up of the cover Bug created.

For a special Saturday morning breakfast, we decided to try a recipe from The Knight's Handbook for honeyed toast (diced toast topped with a syrup of honey, cinnamon, ginger, and pepper and sprinkled with chopped nuts). Yum!

Friends! Pizza! Movie!
One day this week I had to go to the doctor to have an in-office procedure done. Since this involved my arriving at the office already mildly sedated and returning home still loopy, I am very thankful for wonderful friends and neighbors! The girls had a blast: They got to join their best friends for an all-afternoon playdate that migrated from their friend's house across the street back to ours, while one of the other moms drove me. Then when I got home, we ordered pizza and had a picnic dinner in the living room while watching Disney's Sleeping Beauty (We checked out a non-Disney version of the story from the library awhile back, which they loved. A comparative analysis of the stories followed, of course.)

Et Cetera
Monkey and Bug made the exciting discovery (with minimal instruction) that they were capable of making toast all by themselves! Obviously, we ate lots of toast for breakfast this week. Bug pitched in to help make dinner several evenings this week, and she informed me at some point that she thought when she was 10 she would be able to make a whole meal all by herself--at least an easy meal.

I also taught the girls our address this week: less in order to have them memorize it and more as an easily accessible way to straighten out the differences between cities, states, and countries that they've been struggling with. Bug decided she wanted to actually mail a letter this week, so we also experienced that process and discussed what important things/information needed to be on the envelope.

The girls started growing things this week! Monkey and Bug have strawberry kits, and Goose picked
cilantro. The cilantro grows fast, but we could just seed the strawberry plants starting to peek out of the soil by the end of the week.