Library Day

(Nothing to do with the library,
just too cute) Goose decided
to play milliner this week
and designed these hats for
herself and Monkey.

This week's story time theme was dinosaurs! The crowd was pretty excited! The librarian even brought along her T-rex puppet to join in the fun. There really was quite a crowd this week, so the girls didn't want to hang around long. We picked out some great books before we left though:
Angelina Ballerina
Spot Goes to a Party
The Girl on the High Diving Horse
Nora's Stars
Traction Man is Here!
I Have a Little Problem, said the Bear
Dust Devil (a pioneer era tall tale)
Frank was a Monster who Wanted to Dance
Boris and the Snoozebox
Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
Can You Do This, Old Badger?

Three Rs
Goose just did a weeklong review session of the letters we've covered so far: A, B, C, D, and E. She did some coloring sheets and played a couple of matching games--matching letters to appropriate objects and matching upper and lower case letters. She also did a number of counting worksheets and several worksheets that practice pencil control. Her sisters have even been noticing her improvement in coloring inside the lines (I think I overheard Bug giving her lessons in technique at some point).

Monkey finished Ten Apples up on Top! this week. She was quite excited about conquering another book. For math this week, she joined Bug for a lesson on place value, and she reviewed the numbers 10-19 (knowing them out of order, and understanding that each number is 10 plus however many) and she worked on counting by 10s (being able to identify them out of order and understanding that each number is however many 10s). Once she had a working understanding of those concepts, I introduced greater than/less than problems, which she completely beautifully. And of course, we also practiced some simple addition (sums less than 10). For writing she practiced her whole name, did a little copywork, and completed a research project (more on that in a bit).

Bug continued reading Are You My Mother? The number of pages she read per day slowed to my acceptable minimum, but she's continued reading almost all the words the fast way. I also overheard her reading books to Goose this weekend (reading by herself for fun! Hooray!) For math, we formally reviewed place value (she was getting flustered with her addition problems, so we took a deep breath and a small step back, and pulled Monkey in for the lesson too). The review definitely helped solidify her ability to do double digit addition, and I even gave her the opportunity to add a couple of 7-digit numbers together (it didn't involve any carries). Conquering such a HUGE problem was quite the confidence booster! I also covered the concept of carrying the 1, which proved to be rather enlightening for her since one of the things throwing her off was that she had to add the ones place first when we do everything else from left to right--it just seemed backwards! Once I explained why we have to do that, it became much easier for her to remember. She also did a bunch of greater than/less than problems ("Those are easy-peasy!" she says).

I used bundled toothpicks and loose toothpicks to help illustrate
tens and ones, when we discussed place value. After the math
lesson though, the girls commandeered them for more creative play.
Here, Monkey experimented with some geometric designs.

Bug used the toothpicks to "draw" the Ingalls' house from our
history lessons. It even included the chimney and the well. The
colorful structure off to the side is her Lego version of their house.

Research
This week I introduced the idea of doing a research project. We talked about what "research" means: choosing a topic and finding out more about it. Then I had them brainstorm ways they could do that: look it up in one of our books, find books at the library, look it up on the Internet, and study it in real life at a zoo, aquarium, or museum. Then we talked about the next step--putting what they found in a format they could show to other people. For a quick and easy first project, I had them each choose an animal and decided we'd limit our researching to looking it up in our animal encyclopedia (so of course, we talked about what an encyclopedia is and how one would find a topic in it). Here are the finished projects:

Monkey's is on top, and Bug's is on the bottom.
(They just dictated the actual report.)

 

Miss Independence
Some social/emotional switch must have flipped in Monkey and Bug's brains recently, because they both made some major progress in confidence and independence in the past week: Last Sunday they joined Daddy and I at the front of the church when we officially joined and they willingly shook hands and introduced themselves in the reception line. On Wednesday, they actually jumped in for the song and dance part of the kids program at church! (It helped considerably that I finally managed to get us there a few minutes early, so it was relatively quiet and uncrowded when they arrived.) On Thursday, they excitedly told me that they finally had a chance to make friends with another little girl in their jujitsu class--they even found out her name and had a chance to play some kind of racing game (I think that's probably the first time they've managed introductions without adult guidance!). During our trip this weekend (I'll do a post on that later), they appropriately responded to strangers on the elevator, interacted with wait staff on several occasions (they ordered their own food and even said "No, thank you," "Yes, sir," etc. as called for). On several occasions at a museum and a playground, they even played cheerfully with kids they'd never met before. Considering that several years ago they would routinely burst into tears when spoken to by an unfamiliar person, this is pretty amazing, and I am so excited for them!

Goose's most recent step to being a big girl is that we've ditched the paci entirely. For a long time she's only used it for naps and nighttime, but this weekend we accidently left town without one (I swear it really was unintentional.). She did amazingly well without it (only one meltdown at bedtime), so we decided to stick with no paci when we got home. No diapers and no pacifiers! It's the beginning of a whole new era for entourage!