Library Day
Another quiet library day . . . We came home with these books:
Mittens
Piglet and Granny
My Friend Rabbit
Little Blue Truck Leads the Way
The Night Eater
Our Tree Named Steve
Bear Feels Scared

Medieval Dinner and a Movie
On Monday this week, we read the pages in the Eyewitness book about Medieval food--what they ate, how they cooked it, what place settings were like, proper Medieval table etiquette, and how those differed between the classes. To top it off, we cooked a typical Medieval meal for us: boiled chicken, whose broth was used to make pottage (a vegetable soup thickened with grain) and which was served up on trenchers (thick slices of bread). I cheated, of course, with modern conveniences like boneless chicken, frozen veggies, and bread from the grocery store. Still, it was pretty tasty!

This week the girls asked if we could watch Sleeping Beauty again when I wasn't "wobbly," a pretty apt description of my state after my doctor's appointment last week. I agreed, and we not only watched the movie, but at the girls' request we also watched the first 30 minutes of the Making of Sleeping Beauty feature. I was skeptical about how interesting they would actually find this, but it was awesome! Most of those first 30 minutes were spent discussing how the background and animation style was inspired by Medieval art, illustrations, and tapestries. We got to see lots of the works the animators studied and comparisons to animation cels. The girls and I were fascinated.

While Sleeping Beauty is obviously a fairy tale, not history, the concepts of knights and royalty fit into a lot of their recent play. At some point though, they decided the traditional storyline just didn't work for them, so they've been changing it up using their dolls and stuffed animals. In one version I overheard, Briar Rose (the name they prefer because it's from the book, played by one of the Indian puppets) backed up by a small army of fairies confronts Maleficent (played by a stuffed pig with wings) and proclaims, "Ha! Your magic's not strong enough to make me fall asleep!" In the ensuing battle, Maleficent apparently starts flinging magic around. Some of it misses Briar Rose and hits Prince Philip (one of the teddy bears) instead. This princess has no time to pause for a gentle romantic kiss to awaken him, however; instead she grabs her "brother" (the girls seem confused about this since romantic love obviously hasn't entered their worldviews yet) and yells, "Hey, Philip! Wake up! Wake up!" He wakes up, and obviously Maleficient doesn't stand a chance against this duo.

We also studied a person from actual Medieval history this week: Joan of Arc. I had several Joan of Arc coloring sheets for them to work on while I read a short biography I found online. I confess, however, that I chose to focus on what she accomplished in life rather than the circumstances of her death--they'll learn that tidbit soon enough. The idea of a female warrior was just as intriguing to them as I thought it would be. Now at their request I need to do some research about any female knights.

Lessons
For Monkey's reading lessons this week, we read the Animal Encyclopedia entry about bears (with a combination of repetition  sounding out, and sight reading), and she did several coloring pages of familiar nursery rhymes that included the rhyme written out. I wasn't sure how much she was really reading and how much she was reciting, but when I asked her to point to particular words in the rhyme, she could accurately find them. Goose wanted in on the nursery rhyme reading lesson, so I printed up "Humpty Dumpty" for her. She almost has that one memorized.

Monkey tackled a connect-the-dots page for one of her reading lessons and did measuring for the others. One day her sisters decided to join her; Monkey manned the yardstick, Goose grabbed a ruler, and Bug tracked down a measuring tape. They measured tons of items in the playroom. I was impressed that Goose accurately measured a few one and two inch things, and I introduced Monkey and Bug to the concept of "so many and a half inches." They really seemed to enjoy being able to measure more specifically.

This week Bug celebrated reaching page 200 in her reading book! She's reading more word lists and stories with no dots, too. She also added the sound e as in egg. She really loves her math lessons though. She did a connect-the-dots page, a fill-in-the-number-sequence page (i.e., 1, _, 3), a few search and find pages that asked her to circle the appropriate number in the chart, and half a dozen comparison pages (i.e., circle the biggest items, cross out the lightest items, etc.).