Greek Fashion
We started off our week with a foray into ancient Greek fashion. We read the appropriate section of the Eye Witness book and perused the book for additional samples. Tradition chitons turned out to be incredibly easy to make! Two rectangles of fabric, a handful of safety pins, a belt and--voila!--outfit complete!

We also read the Eye Witness section about food (while we did feast last Friday, we didn't actually read up on the food specifically). Another day we settled in for a long cozy teatime and read a wide selection of Aesop's fables and Heracles stories. The fables, of course, led to lots of good discussions about what lessons the stories are teaching. We wrapped up our history studies this week by watching the DVD about ancient Greece that we got from the library. It covered a lot of aspects of life in ancient Greece, and the girls got to see video of actual ruins along with replicas and reenactments of things like the Olympic games (not entirely historically accurate as the athletes were, thankfully, fully clothed for the video).

Library Day
The theme for storytime was mysteries, and the books read all involved questions being asked or things not being what they seemed (e.g., It Looked Like Spilled Milk). The girls played cheerfully alongside some other kids afterward and picked out lots of books for us to bring home:
Once There was a Bull . . . Frog
An Edible Alphabet
Are We There Yet, Daddy?
The Queen of France
You're Finally Here!
Lolly-pops
Count Down to Clean Up!
Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend
When the Teddy Bears Came
You're Mean, Lily Jean!
Felix Feels Better
Sumo Mouse
(Note: I very rarely pick out the books to take home now. All three girls have gotten to be pretty excited about picking out their own books. Goose picks things off the shelf at random, but Monkey and Bug seem to have gotten a little more distinguishing in their choices. I've no idea what their criteria is, but not every book that comes off the shelf gets put in our bag now.)

Three Rs
Math for Monkey and Bug involved more work on telling time and simple fractions (they can now add up things like 1/4 + 1/4 = 1/2), and continuing to work on adding multi-digit numbers (they were very excited to discover some Starfall games that work on this skill this week too). I realized some of the Starfall games they were trying to play also involved subtraction, so we did a lesson on that as well. They both grasped the concept pretty quickly (really it's a just a matter of their remembering that "-" means "take away"). Bug is still practicing skip counting and working on memorizing the 5 times table. Goose is still practicing counting through some picture books, worksheets, and just spontaneously counting objects.

For reading the big girls are still having fun picking through our collection of easy readers, and they were thrilled to discover a new Bob book easy reader at the library, which they both read through on Friday. Bug has also really enjoyed reading familiar books to Goose--fun for all! Goose learned the letter H this week and mostly wanted to repeat the activity of thinking up things that start with H and having me draw them on the white board. Monkey and Bug always get in on this too.

To practice writing this week, both girls wanted to answer question pages: Bug wanted to practice Bible quizzing (she did the stories of Moses and Jonah this week), and Monkey wanted to learn about sea animals (conveniently enough, before our visit to the aquarium, so she was feeling very knowledgeable about the jellyfish and octopuses). Monkey also spent some time practicing her name and a few other random words she wanted to spell.

To the Aquarium!
The girls and I spent a fantastic afternoon at the aquarium this week! (That membership card is going to get lots of use.) It's a huge place, so we just focused on a few highlights: We arrived just in time for the Albatross Encounter and got to meet the only albatross living in captivity (she was rescued as a chick after a wing injury). Then we headed to the exhibit about jellyfish to complete a kind of scavenger hunt. The aquarium's website has tons of printable activities; this one had labeled photos of different species of jellyfish for the girls to identify and check off as they found them. The girls could usually do this based on differences in physical details without my having to tell them the species name first.


playing in the tidal pools and climbing into a life-size giant clam

Then we headed for the hands-on kids section that had been too crowded to enter last time we were there. They loved it! They got to climb through "kelp forest" and "coral reef" play spaces that included tiny screens with videos of the kind of creatures that would live there, they played with plastic fish and boats in a "tidal pool" complete with regularly occurring waves and "rocks" they could rearrange to study the affects of the waves, they dressed up in sea life costumes, they made crayon rubbings of pictures of different local species of sea life, listened to the noises of things like seals, dolphins, and whales and tried out the movements of flippers and fins. Before we left we made it to the penguin feeding and Q & A session. In addition to all the typical adult members of the rookery, they had an adolescent penguin who still had her baby feathers and an adult penguin in the process of molting.