Weather Permitting

After about two weeks of seemingly non-stop rain showers and thunderstorms, the inclement weather was starting to get really old. Finally on Sunday the forecast included only rain, and I announced an afternoon activity that brightened the day for everyone: The girls donned their bathing suits and spent a good thirty minutes to an hour dancing, shrieking, running, and giggling in the "great, big sprinklers!" while Daddy and I watched from the shelter of the front porch. They came in drenched and shivering but very happy!

After that day, the weather really improved. To celebrate our first truly rain-free day, the girls and I made frozen pink lemonade to enjoy outside while doing our day's lessons with sidewalk chalk on the driveway. (It was one of those "This is why I love homeschooling!" moments.) We also pulled out the kid-powered vehicles and headed to the cul-de-sac to play. Goose had her little red riding toy, Monkey chose to bring her trike, and Bug brought her new bike. She still has training wheels, but she and Monkey outgrew their old bikes. Bug at least is getting a lot more confident on her "wobbly bike" and was even willing to get back on after toppling over when she hit a curb.

Zoo Day!

The good weather continued, and we decided to make Friday a zoo day. Some friends of ours were also going that day, but, while it was fun to say hi to familiar faces, we decided to stick to our own plan. The girls had a list of particular animals they wanted to see on this visit, and we tend to skip some animals and spend longer amounts of time studying others. Our first stop on this visit was the bears at Bug's request. Definitely a good choice! We got to witness one waking up the other by pulling on his ears and the ensuing play/fight. Pretty impressive. Bug also wanted to feed the giraffes and the goats. Fortunately, she told me this ahead of time, so I could make sure I brought appropriate change. Bug and Goose were brave enough to feed the giraffes; although Goose only

We had fun examining
several new statues--
animals made by reusing
old materials (we discovered
this lion, for example, had a
mane made of old nails).

A classic pose atop the elephant statue

gave them one lettuce leaf since the giraffe wrapped his tongue all the way around her wrist in his attempt to get it. (Me: "What did his tongue feel like?" Goose: "Gross!") Monkey decided to join them in feeding and petting the goats. At Monkey's request we found the bats (they were eating breakfast near the ceiling while the zookeeper cleaned the floor of their room) and the ostriches (they were conveniently right next to the fence when we arrived, so we got a really good view). We also ran into a zookeeper with a corn snake wrapped around his arm, so we got to take a close up look at that and to hear the keeper answer some questions about it. Another highlight was a new display at the gorilla house that allowed the girls to hear the different sounds they make and interpret facial expressions.

Library Day

This week's story time was supposedly about worms, but none of the books were about worms and we made coffee filter butterflies for the craft (fun even if unrelated to any of the books). We came home with these books:

White Tiger, Blue Serpent

The Butterfly's Dream

Let's Go for a Drive (an Elephant and Piggie book)

Cornelius

Don't Eat the Babysitter!

The Sleepy Little Alphabet

More on Imperial China

We checked out another Chinese storybook from the library this week: The Butterfly's Dream is a retelling of several of the ancient Chuang Tzu stories (they remind me of Aesop's fables), which the girls love--both the stories and the traditional Chinese style illustrations. We read it almost everyday. We also kept the White Tiger, Blue Serpent book, another Chinese folktale. The Butterfly's Dream even features the titles in Chinese calligraphy, which the girls were fascinated by. So, one day this week, we read the Eyewitness book's section on Chinese writing, and the girls did their reading lesson that day by painting words of their choice. (This of course evolved into a general painting pictures session.)

This week we also studied the Eyewitness sections on ancient Chinese farming. The girls were particularly interested in the man-powered irrigation machines. After reading up on farms, we watched the section of Fearless that featured rice planting and following the seasons through a farming village. They even had one of those irrigation machines. The girls also got to see typical clothes, buildings, and cooking techniques. 

Lessons
Neither of the big girls added new sounds this week, but they did lots of reading. Even Monkey has been much more willing to sound out words this week! She and Bug worked together to read several sentences when we had our lessons outside, and Monkey's been asking me to write sentences on the white board for her to read inside. Bug is still working her way through her textbook, and added the "funny words" talk and walk this week. For the reading lessons Goose requested, I wrote a half dozen letters on the white board and asked her to point to the ones I named. She can't actually do this very accurately of course, but she loved the game and she's slowly gaining some letter recognition.

Math has been fun this week too. On the day we did lessons outside, we practiced counting by tens: I wrote out the numbers and the girls screamed the names of them as loud as they could repeatedly. Our neighbors may have wondered what was going on, but we had a blast. Monkey and Bug also acquired new workbooks this week. The Target dollar bins had a great selection this week, and we came home with books for numbers 1-12 (just for Monkey), math concepts, and addition. Monkey did about a dozen pages in the number recognition book, and they both started on the addition books. Bug also worked on a couple of counting money pages from her current book.