This Saturday we decided to visit the aquarium and purchase our membership (I think it'll definitely be worth it!). It turned out to be more of a reconnaissance mission than an in-depth look--the aquarium was absolutely packed on a Saturday morning! Several sections looked like they'd be fun, but were pretty much inaccessible thanks to the crowds. I didn't even try to get photos; there were just too many people. We did get to see some cool stuff though--sharks, sea stars, lots of varieties of anemones and jellyfish, flatfish, crabs, sand dollars, penguins, etc. We took a picnic lunch to eat on the shoreline (and inadvertently shared with the pigeons and sea gulls). The girls and I will definitely being making return visits!
Library Day
We got to the library early enough for the girls to have the kids' section to themselves for a little while. After storytime there are tons of kids, and it's not nearly as much fun to hang out. This week's storytime theme was toys and games--lots of cute books. We came home with these books:
The Baby Who Roared
Dreamtime Fairies
Once upon a Cloud
Little Bear
The Duckling Gets a Cookie
One Bear at Bedtime
Bill and Pete
Museum ABC
Pancakes! Pancakes!
Best Friends for Frances
I may have mentioned this before, but Bug has set a goal for herself of being able to cook a meal by the time she's 10. This seems reasonable to me, and lately she's really been working on her kitchen skills. The biggest step was discovering that the ulu knife Daddy and I bought in the Pacific Northwest is the perfect tool for little hands: She can push straight down onto the blade, and the concave cutting board helps keep everything corralled. She's also cooked ground beef for me (I'm colorblind and therefore unable to safely cook it myself anyway), and successfully measured and mixed ingredients (I gave her instructions for making granola bars, and she was good up until we needed to add the liquids). She's also learned how to work the microwave (for popcorn and thawing bread) and the toaster.
Jujitsu
Monkey and Bug had their first real class this week, and they did a great job. Here they have class for an hour once a week instead of a half hour twice a week. They got through an hour long class with no trouble, and they've been practicing with Daddy at home. Monkey in particular has been working on her somersaults (going over her shoulder instead of straight over her head).
Wednesday Night Church
We did our first Wednesday church night here. We actually found two churches that we really love, but only one of them has mid-week programming for kids too, so we decided to check that out. My little introverts didn't participate much their first week, but that's to be expected. It's actually a bigger group than Sunday mornings at that church, which was unexpected too. I think they'll come around!
Playground
We walked down to the playground twice this week. We had fun, but were disappointed not to make any more new friends there yet. I know I've succeeded in winning my girls over to the this making new friends thing, because once we heard kids voices as we approached the playground, and the girls got all excited about the possibility of making new friends! Sadly, we then discovered the kids voices belonged to an afterschool group of 5-10 year olds that had overwhelmingly taken over the playground. We quickly changed plans and headed for a nearby grove of trees to see if there were any good climbing trees among them.
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| Goose loves to swing! |
The Three Rs
Several moments this week have been real "this is why I love homeschooling" moments related to our formal lessons. First, while not an established routine, it's happened pretty regularly that after snuggling up with each girl individually for reading lessons, the girls have requested I make a pot of herbal tea, and we gather around the kitchen table to sip tea and work through their math and writing lessons. It's just such a cozy way to get the necessary things done. Second, we took our lessons on the road: I had to get something done at the bank that I knew would probably take awhile, so I grabbed the books the girls are reading, and we did reading lessons while waiting for a bank manager to be available. (Of course, this outing also included discussions about what happens in a bank, and why we were there.)
Monkey made one big step forward and one big (but very necessary) step back in her lessons this week. After listening to Bug read from real books for her reading lessons, Monkey really, really wanted to do that too. She's about 30 lessons behind Bug in the textbook, but she hasn't encountered an actual new sound in her lessons for a long time (sounds have been introduced, she's just picked up on them already). So, I told her we'd try it on a trial basis. I would carefully select books for her, but if it became too much of a struggle, we'd go back to the textbook with all the phonetic clues. This week she's been reading her way through Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop and loving it! For math, though, we've temporarily set aside the addition book and gone back to drilling number recognition. In the course of doing lessons early in the week, Daddy and I realized that Monkey couldn't name numerals over 5 with any amount of consistency unless they were listed out in order. She can count beautifully up to whatever number you want and since we do mostly manipulative math, she's been able to hide that lacking skill for a long time. So, this week we pulled out the Sesame Street flash cards and played some games with those to really solidify her knowledge. Taking that backwards step was definitely the right thing to do! She's actually been excited about math lessons again! She made up the rules for one of the flash card games we played (place half a dozen cards object side up on the table, count out how many objects one card, flip the card over to reveal the numeral, write the numeral on her white board), and she's started playing with the magnetic numbers on the fridge again (she puts together 2 or 3 digit numbers, and if necessary enlists Bug's help to figure out what they're called). Writing lessons are going very well. I give them tons of freedom to write what they want to, and Monkey usually writes a sentence or two on a piece of paper then illustrates it.
Bug has been working her way through Go, Dog, Go! this week for her reading lessons. She's ready to drop it and go on to the Little Bear book we got from the library this week, but I decided she needed to practice perseverance and stick with the dogs to the end (She's almost there!). For math, Bug is still working through the addition workbook (she's almost done), and I finally found some brightly illustrated multiplication worksheets online for her to do. There's only a few though (I guess by the time most kids are doing multiplication they're past the brightly-colored-worksheets stage), so I may have to break down and make some of my own. Bug has discovered she really likes doing copy work for her writing lesson. She picks out some piece of text (sometimes from a book; yesterday it was a snippet of Peter Rabbit printed on her mug) and copies it into her composition book. She doesn't just copy the text; she actually notes details of the different fonts (angled lines, serifs, etc.).
For Goose we continued our focus on the letter A. I cut out the letter A in different fonts along with some clip arts of things that start with A, and she created a collage with them (this inspired her sisters to jump in, and create their own collages with materials from the scrap box). She also did several worksheets tracing the letter A, finding and coloring objects that began with that sound, etc. She practices math on her own by randomly counting objects, and she really enjoyed a worksheet that had her circle the correct numeral for the number of items in a box.
Potty Training Note
Goose has got this potty training thing down! She has maybe one accident a day now, and is very excited about finally being a big girl. We've even been out and about quite a bit with no accidents. I didn't mention this last time, but I decided I wanted to share the details of the reward system we used, because it has worked so beautifully for Goose. For the initial few days, we kept a container of M&Ms in the bathroom: she got one M&M for getting pee in the potty and one M&M for having dry underwear at the time (this really helped reinforce the "run to the potty before the pee starts" concept). Also if one of her big sisters helped her through the process without my involvement, her sister got an M&M too (the way to go if you have a "big kid" old enough to help but still young enough to be motivated by getting a single M&M). Once the M&Ms ran out, we switched rewards. Each time Goose gets all her pee in the potty, she gets one piece of a puzzle. Eventually she has the whole thing, and she was so excited about trying to figure out what it was as she accumulated pieces. Also, this meant I got quite a few rewards out of one dollar store puzzle--definitely a parenting win.
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