Library Day
Library day was highly popular this week. The theme was mud, and story time involved several great, muddy books along with plates of actual mud to paint with. Fortunately, the librarians came well armed with wipes and paper towels (and--they reassured the moms--they scheduled this story time for right before the carpet cleaner came).

We came home with these books:
The Wizard
George and Martha: Rise and Shine
Frederick
While Mama had a Quick Little Chat
Blue Sea, Little Fish
The White Tiger and the Blue Serpent 
The Great Wall of China

Imperial China
The girls were very excited when I announced we'd be starting up our next history unit this week! We are now engrossed in Imperial China. We started by spending a lazy Sunday afternoon watching Disney's Mulan, which they loved. Interestingly, I think they were more intrigued by the brief scene on the Great Wall than anything else--thus the book I found at the library about the history, building methods, and current state of the Great Wall of China. Block versions of the Wall have built and rebuilt throughout the living room and playroom this week. Bug has been into perfecting her building methods (overlapping the bricks and building two layers of wall beside each other--she noted that she couldn't really fill in the space between them with dirt the way they built the real wall), and Monkey has been more interested in building the square towers that dot the Wall and manning them with soldiers.

At their suggestion we flipped through their series of Ask Me books for tidbits about China (the Great Wall of China, dancing dragons at festivals, Chinese calligraphy, and fishing with cormorants are all topics we stumbled upon). We also studied the Eyewitness book's sections about traditional Chinese dress and pored over the pictures, looking at robes, jewelry, and hairstyles. I even had a few items of clothing to pull out of my closet for them: an embroidered robe and a shirt with a mandarin collar and monkey fist buttons that they got to try on, and my old kung fu gi (uniform) for them to look at.

The yellow shirt Bug's wearing is actually a family heirloom from Daddy's grandmother
(maybe from Uncle K's travels in Asia?). The robe Monkey is wearing is just my dressing robe,
but she was excited that on her it had really long sleeves like Mulan's fancy dress.

The girls are extremely interested in kung fu between the drill and fight scenes from Mulan, their own study of karate (which they know is from Japan), and their knowledge that Daddy and I both studied kung fu. I picked out a few scenes from the Jet Li movie Fearless to watch with them that showed them not only what kung fu looks like, but also included scenes of a typical upper class home and city from Imperial China and allowed them to hear Chinese spoken (the version we have is subtitled). Monkey has been experimenting with inventing her own kung fu moves including using a "staff" (cheap plastic golf club).

Karate
I assured Monkey that someday she would get to really study kung fu, but in the meantime she and Bug both continue their enthusiastic study of karate. They do extra practices with Daddy a couple times a week, but they also help each other practice (and teach Goose) almost every day. Monkey and Bug take turns leading, and they ask me to help them remember all the things from class they should practice. This week in class they learned a side kick, back fist, and side fist. They also turned in their My Best Lists this week and earned black stripes on their belts. (The My Best List is a month-long parent-created check list of personal care, chores, and good attitudes for the students to complete. I love that this school is concerned about more than just performance on the mat.)

Lessons

The usual reading and math lessons continued this week. Monkey finished up her study of vowels, ending the week by coming up with a list of words that have long and short sounds for each letter. She also did more word building with the cards I made. This week I added a few word cards (for things like I, am, is, the), and we put together a sentence or two for her to read. Bug added the letter sound y as in yard this week, and she got through several word lists and two stories. Both girls did some math worksheets this week, and we started actual lessons in telling time using a wooden puzzle clock with moveable hands and a lift-a-flap paper one I made to help them remember how many minutes correspond to each number on the clock face. With Goose, the big girls and I all continue to casually teach her numbers 1-20, the ABCs, shapes, and colors.

(This photo refuses to go right side up. Weird.)