Three Rs
After such an exciting weekend in San Francisco the girls were pretty excited about having some real stay-at-home days at the beginning of this week. They also rediscovered Starfall.com this week and really mastered using a mouse with a desktop instead of the touchpad on one of the netbooks. They were particularly excited about all the math games they could actually really do instead of just randomly guessing their way through them. They've really learned a ton since the last time they got into this site! (Particularly ego-boosting for me is that they mostly gravitated to the activities labeled for 1st graders!) While not "Three R" related, the site also has quite a music selection, and Monkey decided to play DJ and instigated a little dance party for her sisters with a combination of preschool songs and classical music.

For reading, Monkey is back into the reading textbook this week and doing very well. Bug finally pulled through and finished Are You My Mother? At some point she complained about reading lessons being boring, so we brainstormed a bit and came up with some ways to make it more interested. Bug actually remembered the little paper easy readers Uncle N passed down to them, and we decided it might be more motivated for her to read things she could get through in only one or two sittings. I also made a rhyming activity for both of them to work on together that was pretty popular. I typed up and cut out a bunch of rhyming words, scattered them on the living room floor, then asked the girls to sort out the words that rhyme and read them to me.

Goose learned the letter F this week, and her big sisters really jumped in together on that activity too. I introduced it by writing a big F on the white board and asking all three girls to brainstorm things that start with F and I would draw them. They came up with a ton! And Bug even copied them onto a piece of construction paper when Monkey erased the board to create her own art.

 

Goose is still enthusiastically completing counting worksheets for her math lessons (This is something Goose requests, not something I'm making her sit down and do. To be honest, I can't print them up fast enough for her most days!) For the big girls I changed up how we do math lessons a bit (they still do them separately, though). Instead of choosing one math topic and just focusing on that for the lesson that day, I've been choosing two or three topics for each girls and finding really quick activities for each them. They seem to really like the new method and are just soaking it up. They've both been practicing telling time--focusing on o'clocks and half-pasts at this point. I had them both practice making tens ("If I have X, how many more do I need to make 10?"). It turns out Bug already has these all memorized, but Monkey still counts most of them out on the number line. Monkey continues to practice number recognition for teens and tens, did some greater/less than problems, and practiced simple addition. Bug continues working on adding multi-digit number including carries, practiced skip counting by 2, 5, and 10, and worked on multiplication problems for those numbers as well.



For their writing assignments with week, Monkey and Bug wrote/dictated about our trip to San Francisco and books we're reading. Monkey was really into this and did two about Little House on the Prairie with lovely artwork to with them. Bug is more of a perfectionist, who gets stymied when the letters don't work out quite the way she wants them to (for example, they end up backwards or don't fit on the line properly). She decided to practice a few particularly problem letters to work on the first problem, and was (eventually) willing to work with me to come up with creative solutions for the latter.

History
The girls are still loving reading Little House on the Prairie. This week we talked about things like the pioneers having to make their own furniture and not being able to just run to the store for something (Pa went to the store and had to be gone for four days). The Ingalls survived malaria with the help of their neighbors and had several good and bad interactions with the local Native Americans. This week we also indulged in one of the prairie living staples--cornbread with molasses. Very popular! The girls also pulled out our A to Z in the Alamo book this week, and I pointed out that while this happened before Laura was born, it was roughly the same time period of American settlement of the West.

Library Day
This week's storytime theme was books and the library, and the librarian found some really cute ones to share. Although Monkey and Bug still don't participate in the sing-alongs, they do at least now stand up for the opening and closing songs that are the same every week. This week they also decided that the usual crowd wasn't too many kids afterall, and they actually wanted to stay and play a bit. We came home with these books:
Rhinos Play Soccer
Let's Make Rabbits
Ten Puppies
The Lollipop Caper
Elephants Never Forget
Anansi and the Talking Melons
Magic in the Mist
Can I Keep Him?

Church Workday
This Saturday was a church workday with lots of indoors and outdoors cleaning and maintenance to get done. Fortunately, this was a kid-friendly event, and our girls plus their best friend K3 jumped right in to scrub floor boards, doorways, tables, chairs, and glass doors as high as they could reach with diluted vinegar. Bug also contributed by helping Daddy run cables through a tight space in the sanctuary. After all that we ran out of jobs for little ones, and they spent the rest of the time running around the church campus with the other kids, picking flowers, finding pretty rocks and cool bugs, and finishing up the morning with a picnic lunch provided by some of the other ladies.

We also met up with a big group of other homeschoolers at the
playground this week. The girls made a few new friends, and
had fun building mountains in the wood chips.