Library Day
This week's storytime had a birthday theme complete with real cupcakes to snack on at the end. We listened to several fun birthday stories, then made cards decorated with cupcakes out of tissue paper. Several of our favorite friends were there this week, so we hung out for a long time afterward, and came home with tons of books:
The Yo-yo Man
The Happy Hedgehog
Now and Ben (a neat picture book about how Ben Franklin's inventions effect our lives today)
Alphabet under Construction
An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball
Waking Dragons
Buzz!
The Island of the Skog
Prehistoric Pinkerton
The First Strawberries
Chief Crazy Horse
Black Elk
The Talking Leaves: The Story of Sequoyah
The Mystic Horse

Yellow Belts!
Monkey and Bug passed their third strike test on Thursday, and on Saturday we attended a graduation ceremony where they received their yellow belts! The graduation is a really big deal: it involved their being willing to be up on stage in front of an audience of a couple hundred people and join their classmates in showing off some of their skills before being given their belts. Their class demonstrated a strike drill (jab, cross, uppercut, hook punch), kick walking across the stage, and swinging their nunchucks while walking across the stage (that's hard enough to do while stationary!). Like the rest of their class, Monkey demonstrated a very nice figure eight with her nunchucks. Bug, however, has been struggling with figure eights and decided she would do something she knew she was good at instead. At the last minute backstage and without any adult involvement as far as I know, she decided to do her own thing (propeller spin, over the shoulder, around the back, repeat). I just really impressed that didn't freak out when asked to do something she wasn't confident with!

Monkey and Bug (far left) participating in a school tradition
of kneeling to wipe some sweat on their brand new belts.

 

Bug is SO proud of her new belt!

Lessons (Plus One)
Lessons continue. Monkey and Bug are both making progress with their reading. Monkey can now figure out most words with only one slow sounding out. Bug made a major breakthrough this week: she realized she could sound out words in her head and read everything the fast way out loud! They really finished the math concepts workbooks this week, and Monkey started on her addition book in earnest. I made a stack of flash cards this week for addition problems using all the single digit combinations. Bug's been working her way through that stack. We sorted out which ones she just knows, and she used Cheerios for counters one day to figure out some of the others. She continues working out multiplication spontaneously on her own by asking questions.

Thursday's lessons were made more exciting with an additional member of the entourage: the girls' best friend LA (a homeschooling 3-year-old who lives next door) spent most of the day with us, so her mom could get some serious work done for her at-home business. The girls had a blast. I did regular individual lessons for the big girls first while Goose and LA played. Then we dug up the sidewalk chalk and all went outside for a handwriting lesson for everybody (well, Goose just scribbled). LA's letter of the week was E, so they all focused on that and helped LA come up with a long list words that start with the letter E. Of course, that evolved into just playing outside and my girls helped LA conquer the climbing dome! Then everybody listened in on Goose's lessons: an alphabet book and a fairy-themed counting book, An Invitation to the Butterfly Ball. The latter inspired them to create their own version of the butterfly ball complete with costumes, dancing, and a plastic food banquet.

Happy little homeschoolers!

The beginning of the alphabet Bug was working on outside

Stories of the Plains
We read more picture book biographies and folktales this week, most of which involved the plains tribes: Black Elk, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Sequoyah for the biographies and The Mystic Horse and The First Strawberries for the folktales. For some of these readings we decided to pretend to be Native Americans and sit in our "teepee" (beach tent) in the backyard to hear the stories. The girls are fascinated by teepees because of the decorations and their mobility, so on Friday we decided to make miniature ones the right size for their Playmobil figures. We gathered sticks from the woods near our house, and the girls colored pictures on "buffalo skins" (cutouts from paper bags). Bug got frustrated with the instability of the teepees and decided to move her Playmobil to "pueblos" (the Playmobil police station). Monkey however had quite the camp set up.