Art Museum!
I took my little entourage to check out the local art museum this week. Monkey in particular was very excited; she's declared that someday her artwork is going to be in a museum too. The museum features a permanent exhibit of local paintings and several permanent sculptures outside. The current temporary exhibits included one of huge local landscapes (the girls got a thrill out of recognizing familiar turf), one of hand-colored photography from 1880s Japan (the girls were fascinated by both the samurai and the fancy kimonos), and an exhibit of black-and-white photography (mostly landscapes). We talked about what we saw in the art and what we particularly liked. The girls behaved beautifully, and we got lots of smiles from other patrons (let's be honest, you don't see a lot of preschoolers patronizing the visual fine arts!). The girls wanted to bring their cameras, and we got permission from a staff member to take photos as long as we didn't use a flash. Bug went a bit snap happy, and she was really excited to show Daddy what we'd seen at the museum that day (every single work of art).

After the art museum, we went across the street to explore Friendship Plaza,
a fun little garden with bricked paths and this fountain.

Library Day
Of course this week's theme was Valentine's Day. A new librarian was leading storytime this week, and she brought a couple of "friends" (puppets) with her that the girls got a real kick out of. We came home with these books this week:
Mommy's Little Monster
Hello, Day!
Seven Stars, More!
Something Special
The Night Before Christmas
Elephants Cannot Dance!
George and Martha Back in Town
King Arthur's Very Great Grandson
The Biggest House in the World
On My Way to the Bath
A Summery Saturday Morning
One of the books from last week, Tell Me My Story, Mommy, was about a mom telling her little girl the story of when she was pregnant and the little girl's birth. This, of course, generated lots of discussion with Monkey and Bug and requests to hear their story. I was quite proud of myself actually--I managed to turn what was probably the most physically miserable time of my life into a great little story that got lots of giggles and requests for retellings ("We waited . . . and waited . . . and waited, but [Monkey] STILL didn't want to come out! Finally the doctor had to make her come out. . . . You girls were so used to being together that they had to put you into the same tiny bassinette, so you could sleep with your noses this close together.")

Valentine's Day
The girls and I did absolutely nothing to formally acknowledge Valentine's Day. This has much more to do with my own laziness than it does with ideology. They absolutely loved getting their packages from the grandparents, though! The contemporary celebration of Valentine's Day (love & chocolate) is all over the place, but my curious little bunch wasn't satisfied with that: Why do we do Valentine's Day? What does Valentine mean anyway? I briefly explained the story of St. Valentine. Response: So, a pastor was killed because he thought marriage was important and now we eat candy? Um, yeah . . . that does seem strange, doesn't it?

One of the girls' Valentine's Day packages included little craft kits.
Monkey already put her to use to create this little abstract sculpture.

Grocery Store Fun
The girls made a fun game out of the grocery store this week: for every aisle they chose a different animal to imitate. I think my favorite was the jelly fish--watching three giggly little girls "wibble wobble" down the baking aisle was absolutely hilarious.

Also, I seem to be raising real foodies. Thanks to a cheese and cracker platter we put out when we had friends over for dinner a little while back, the girls requested "fancy cheese" for their grocery shopping treat. Mmmm . . . gouda. Bug's personal favorite, though, she informed me, is Havarti. I guess we'll have to look for that next time.

Three Rs
For reading, Monkey worked through a couple of stories and word lists in her text book. I think she really appreciated being back to having phonics clues, and it gave her enough confidence that by the end of the week she said the textbook was boring and asked if we could do a real book. She conquered the first half a dozen pages of Ten Apples Up on Top on Friday. Monkey has finally mastered numbers 1-13! She did worksheets, flashcards, marshmallow math, and the push up game to accomplish this.

For her reading, Bug has continued reading Little Bear stories, and her fluency is definitely improving. For math Bug did some marshmallow math with multiplication at the beginning of the week. Later in the week she asked if we could go back to adding. I think she was hoping for super-easy, but I introduced some new concepts instead: adding two digit numbers (e.g., 10 + 12) by first adding the ones then the tens and adding three numbers together. She was obviously struggling with some of it, but I was so proud of her for persevering through the hard parts without melting down or giving up.

For their writing lessons this week, both big girls made use of paper hearts inscribed with Bible verses about love that their Sunday School teacher gave them. Everyday they'd each pick out a heart to copy out the verse on the white board.

Goose learned the letter D this week through collage projects, worksheets and the magnets on the fridge. She also did marshmallow math and math worksheets dealing with numbers 1-10. She's been able to count to 10 by rote for a long time, but she's actually getting much better at number recognition now.

At the end of the week, I introduced the girls to a fun counting game: hopscotch! Part of our backyard is done with square bricks that are the perfect size and pattern for hopscotch. I also made a "hop to" board for Goose that she really loved: I wrote numbers 1-9 in random order in a square grid, and she had to hop to whatever number I called out.

History Update
I don't think I wrote about it last week, but our history unit about the pioneers continues in the form of daily readings from Little House on the Prairie. The girls are huge fans! (It's the true story of a mom, dad, and three little girls moving West--of course, it's fascinating!) They're learning about living conditions back then (cooking, washing clothes, washing dishes) and things like how to build a log cabin. They were also pretty excited when they realized a local history mural at the art museum included a covered wagon. Now they want to know what our town was like before lots of people moved here. (Fortunately, I discovered a local history museum that I'm hoping will answer all their questions. I guess know where our next field trip is going to be!)