Pool Time
Monday was one of those "this is why I love homeschooling" days. By 10 a.m. the girls had finished all their formal lessons, so we headed out for a two-hour health & safety and PE class, i.e., we went to the neighborhood pool, which we had all to ourselves. This process involved answering questions about why we wear sunscreen and how swimming is a form of exercise, reviewing pool safety rules, and of course working on actual swimming skills. All three girls can paddle around the pool independently with floaty noodles tied around their waists. Monkey and Bug both practiced doing star fish floats (Bug has gotten really good at this), and Bug also tried actually dog paddling without the noodle on for a long time. Goose also worked on getting in and out of the pool by herself. Their favorite game during this pool visit was to throw sponge balls out into the pool to swim out to. I just tried to stay centrally located in case anyone needed assistance.

Library Day
Story time is back! The theme for the first fall session was simply books, and the librarian had some fun books about books to share. Then the girls got to make bookmarks that said "I <3 Books" by gluing magazine cutouts to strips of poster board. We got to hangout with some of our usual friends as well as make a new one (a fellow milspouse who's new to the area and her toddler son). As usual we came home with lots of books (including a small collection of picture book biographies for our Native American history unit):
Bye Bye Binky!
Can I Throw Your Ball?
Pamela the Camel
ABC
How Chipmunk Got His Stripes (Native American folktale)
Sacagawea
The Boy Called Slow (biography of Sitting Bull)
Squanto and the Pilgrims

Milestones

Bug's been very into skyscrapers, and she
constructed this huge one out of Legos. She
even thought through building a wider base,
so it would fall over as easily.

The big one this week was Bug's deciding that she is really, really done sucking her thumb. She's been trying very hard, but this week she said she was really having trouble remembering and asked if we could put a bandaid on her thumb to keep her from putting it in her mouth. We've gone through a lot of bandaids, but it's working!

Kind of funny milestone: Goose figured out how to swish and spit, so she's using big kid toothpaste just like her sister's now! It's a little thing, but she was very excited about getting to do something like a big girl.

Goose's other "big girl" thing is that she now gets to go to the preschool Bible study on Wednesday nights. Monkey and Bug are in there too (other church night activities don't start until 1st grade), and Goose was the only kid in the nursery. The nursery worker and preschool teacher talked it over, and we decided to Goose could handle the activities and would probably have a lot more fun with the other kids.

Lessons
We did official lessons (as opposed to the learning they do all the time everywhere) four days this week, which I've decided is going to be my goal.

Goose has decided that, at least at the moment and unlike her sisters, she's not that into coloring sheets (there goes that plan). However, Bug has been absolutely thrilled to read ABC and counting books to Goose, while I work with Monkey. Then whenever Monkey's done, she whisks Goose off into whatever their pretend play of the day is going be, so it all works out anyway.

For reading, Bug is getting to where most of her reading is done "the fast way" without having to sound out every letter, and her stories continue growing in length and shrinking in font size. Monkey continues working on her sounding out skills, but she's getting better everyday (only a few words requiring sounding out half a dozen times before it clicks; she goes through most words just a couple of times). I've also made her lessons a little more enticing by incorporating her word lists into short somewhat nonsensical stories and having her read just the words from the list, while I read the rest. (Interesting learning style difference: Bug loves conquering a list and seeing just how far she can go; Monkey couldn't care less about how many words she read--she needs them to mean something more significant!)

They're still very into the math workbooks, and both girls continue to usually do more than required. This week Monkey did more addition and practicing writing numbers, while Bug did more shapes, measuring, and comparisons. They got their new Puzzle Buzz magazines, so I let them count completing some of those dot-to-dot, mazes, and hidden picture puzzles as their math lessons. Bug has also been discovering multiplication on her own this week. A typical totally-out-of-the-blue interchange goes like this:
     Bug: How many is two 10s?
     Me: Twenty
     Bug: So, that means four 5's is twenty, right?
     Me: Yep

This week I finally remembered to make handwriting part of our usual lessons. Bug is very into it, and has systematically written the entire alphabet (upper and lowercase) a couple of times by going through a dry erase workbook. She also wrote a couple of sentences all by herself (interesting--she had all the write letters in each word, but not always in the right order, i.e., over her drawing of a sheep "Cna ti baa?" = "Can it baa?") Monkey is practicing letters more at random. She has a favorite pen she likes to use, and she practices on blank paper whatever letters catch her fancy, verifying with me that she has them facing the right way. She can write her name all by herself now!

More Native American Adventures
This week we talked a lot about houses and boats. We actually flipped through the DK book looking for all the different kinds of houses they lived in, noting what materials they used and how many people would have lived in each one. The girls were most intrigued by teepees: "When they need to move, they don't need to find a next new house like we do. They just pack up the whole house and move it with them!" They were very excited when we went for a playdate at their friend V's house, and he had a teepee they could play in. They noted with disappointment that it was just made out of cloth though, not animals skins like a real one. The topic of boats came up after reading the story of Sacagawea (which they loved). We talked about different kinds of boats the Native Americans used (canoes, kayaks, and bullboats are the ones that came up), and the girls have spent a long time exploring "new lands" by paddling their "great big canoe" (the couch).

We made mini totem poles this week too. I found some good templates online that the girls used to color faces. We also watched some YouTube videos about how real totem poles are carved. While the girls colored, I discovered NativeRadio.com--a great source of free streaming Native American music. The girls really liked all the drums featured in the songs we heard.

In addition to reading the Sacagawea story, we read several Native American folktales that we happen to own copies of. We didn't get to the other biographies from the library this week, but I'm planning to keep them around for a few weeks anyway for repeated readings.