New Traditions
I realized we started a few new traditions recently. The first one just kind of happened as part of my lazy Sunday resolution: I realized that for the past month or so we've watched a movie together and had a picnic on the living room floor. Sometimes it's related to something they're studying (like Brother Bear for our Native American studies or Ninja Turtles for their karate classes) and sometimes it's just a good, fun movie (like the Aristocats). We've decided we're keeping this routine.

Then Daddy started a "great books and bonding with Daddy" tradition. On the four nights a week that he does the bedtime story he reads them a chapter out of a kid-friendly novel. (Goose isn't as big a fan of this new routine, but I read picture books on my nights to do bedtime.)They recently finished The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Monkey and Bug loved it! I got to hear all about the White Witch, Mr. Tumnus, Lucy, etc. Now they've started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. 

The last recently started tradition began with the coincidental timing of Bug's request that we do this and the same activity suggested from a parenting book I'm reading: Every day I try to spend a few minutes (like 5, maybe 10) with each girl individually. I know I spend all day, everyday with them en masse, but they rarely get one-on-one time. Now that Goose is turning out to be just as talkative as Bug, they're competing for conversation and poor Monkey never gets a word in edgewise. At the moment it's worked out to build these one-on-one moments into quiet time, and each girl gets to talk about whatever she wants. So far only Monkey has needed any prompting, but getting her going is as simple as asking what she's happy about today.

Mmmm....Pumpkins!
Speaking of traditions, autumn is here, and once again we decided to eat a pumpkin instead of decorating it. This year our grocery store actually has sugar pie pumpkins, and it was delicious! We roasted the seeds and just ate the rest of the pumpkin mashed with butter, brown sugar, and a few spices. It all disappeared quick, so I'm sure we'll be doing that again this season.

Zoo Day!
For our "no lessons" day this week, we headed to the zoo. The weather was looking a little ominous, but I'm so glad we took the risk. The weather stayed comfortably cool, but never rained, we had the zoo practically all to ourselves, and the animals were all awake and active. Highlights of this visit included riding the carousel, petting a boa constrictor (closely supervised by a couple of zookeepers), going nose to nose (through the glass) with a silverback gorilla, watching the other gorilla play in their indoor rooms, and finding at least one animal to represent each letter of the alphabet (at the end of the day we were only missing 3 letters in our list).

The girls insisted we take their usual photo atop the elephant statue!

Library Day
Storytime this week featured snakes--appropriately enough considering our zoo visit of the day before! We got to hear lots of fun books, and make construction paper chain snakes of our own. We came home with these books:
Tell the Truth, B. B. Wolf
Count and See
We Are in a Book!
Jump!
Wave
Shapes and Things
The Polar Bear Son (Inuit folktale)
How Rabbit Lost His Tail (Cherokee folktale)

The Three R's
Bug hit a major milestone in her reading lessons this week! She's now transitioning from reading with phonetic marks to just reading a normal serif typeface. She's was a bit intimidated by reading without all the clues, but the curriculum handles the switch well, and she's so excited about being able to read real books! She and I have already started talking about what her reading lessons will look like once she's done with the textbook. Monkey didn't have any major changes in her reading this week, but she's continuing to get better. She's also started taking more interest in how far ahead Bug is and what her lessons look like (we'll see if it's motivating enough for her to do the extra work and catch up. She's already working through the book at a faster pace than Bug did).

They did a couple pages from their workbooks this week, and they did lots of addition with manipulatives (the abacus is probably their favorite). We also played a game of Magic: The Gathering this week. They can definitely do more math in their heads than they'll admit to during a typical lesson! Monkey started figuring out multiplication on her own this week too. At some point while contemplating her own hands, she realized that two 5s made 10, then she borrowed her sisters' hands and sorted out multiplying by 5s up to 30. I love watching them make discoveries like this!

In addition to all the biology knowledge absorbed at the zoo, we watched The Magic School Bus episode touring the digestive system and looked it up in their anatomy book. On the way home from church Wednesday night, we had another discussion about the solar system. We discussed why the moon looked different on different nights (it was a crescent moon that night), and noted that the bright "star" we saw was actually the planet Venus (they thought this was awesome!). A sign that all this science talk is sinking in: Bug's first question after being informed it was a planet not a star was "Venus--is that one of the gas planets or the solid planets?"

Outside of reading the folktales listed among our library books we really didn't do any history this week. That probably means it's time to start planning our next unit!