We're enjoying the west coast weather with chalk drawings and picnics in the backyard!

Library Day
The theme for storytime this week was the Chinese New Year and horse stories--this being the year of the horse on the Chinese calendar. The girls were very excited about the "gold" coins in fancy red envelopes they each received on their way out. The girls didn't want to stay long to play because there were so many kids, but we came home with lots of fun books:
Animal Parade
Bravo, Minski
The Voyage Turtle Rex
Weird Parents
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? 
Ten Oni Drummers (Monkey and Bug are learning to count in Japanese for their jujitsu class, so they were pretty excited about finding this one.)
How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?
Old Turtle
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day


Picasso Potato!
We did a quick artist study about Pablo Picasso this week. It began when Monkey creatively rearranged Mr. Potato Head's face. When she gleefully revealed her work, I exclaimed, "It's a Picasso Potato!" Then of course, I had to explain why I said that. We Googled Picasso and had fun perusing his oeuvre: the "little drawings" (his line drawings), "regular paintings" (his blue period), and his "crazied up paintings" (cubism). Monkey was particularly a fan of the vibrant colors used in Picasso's cubism paintings.

Oh, Pioneers!
You can tell we're settling into the new routine--we started a history unit this week. I thought it'd be appropriate to study the westward expansion and the pioneers, since we just finished our own westward migration. We started reading through a Kids Discover magazine about the pioneers and had lots of discussions about the differences between our trip and the trips the pioneers families made a long time ago (cars & a moving truck vs. wagons, 2 weeks vs. 3-5 months, hotels & restaurants vs. camping, etc.)

Kids Club
We found our new church home! Goose is enjoying the preschool class, and making some new friends (particularly D, whose family also attends OCF with us). Monkey and Bug are involved in the Kids Club--Sunday school for kindergarten through fifth graders that's much more rigorous than the kids programs they've been in previously. They're studying the Tabernacle right now, and they came home with a list of scripture passages for us to read and discuss together. When we started adding those to our daily Bible time, I realized the girls have only used Bible storybooks, and I needed to explain how Bible references work. Monkey was particularly fascinated by the system, and spent quite a while flipping through the pages of a real Bible. Based on comments Monkey and Bug made, they're definitely paying attention in class, and their teacher Miss C is really wonderful. They're also working on memorizing Psalm 100.

The Three Rs
We had three stay-at-home days this week, so we had uninterrupted mornings for lessons (that's the new normal here--nice, but it means Thursdays are a bit crazy since library storytime, jujitsu lessons, and OCF all happen that day).

For reading, Bug finished Go, Dog, Go! and read the first Little Bear story. She only has to sound things out occasionally and her reading is getting much more fluent. For math, she's been working on addition (she has a few pages left in her workbook) and multiplication (I finally made a few times table worksheets for her). She also did some Cheerio math alongside Monkey and Goose. For writing, she joined Monkey in copying out their memory verse. We wrote it out on the easel and took turns writing a phrase at a time.

Monkey is almost done with Hop on Pop; she's been doing a great job of sounding words out and adding some sight words. Writing, as I mentioned, involved copying out the memory verse with Bug. Math continues to be a struggle. We did some Cheerio math, where I wrote digits in boxes on a piece of paper out of order and had her fill in the appropriate number of Cheerios. Then I decided to go back and focus on just one problem number per day. Going through the numbers 6-8 this week, she would repeatedly trace each digit and then write it out on her own, then she'd complete a search-and-find page for each number (lots of numbers all jumbled together on a page, she has to circle all of whatever number we're studying that day), and for a final fun reinforcement I decided to capitalize on her interest in art: I printed out a large version of number of the day on a piece of paper and asked her to turn it into artwork that would help her remember each number. She got a real kick out of this project, and they're all displayed on fridge now.

Goose's letter of the week was B. She completed a collage of letters and objects that start with B, completed a butterfly coloring sheet, and cheerfully pointed out Bs whenever she spotted them in books we were reading. Goose has also recently discovered a love for math worksheets. She's been matching up numbers to groups of objects, tracing digits, and doing dot-to-dot pictures.

All three girls have been having lots of fun with the letters and numbers on fridge this week. It's been encouraging to hear them reinforcing in play what we've been going over in lessons.

The girls are really loving having the dresser full of craft
supplies conveniently in the study (instead of in the garage)