Tentacles!
Some friends of ours had this past Monday off from school (They've recently decided to home school next year, and the entourage is SO excited!), so we decided to meet at the aquarium to check out the new exhibit: Tentacles! It was a great exhibit, and we learned all about octopuses, squid, cuttlefish, and nautiluses. Most of these creature are amazingly good at camouflage, so we had fun playing "spot the cephalopod" as we approached each new tank.

Of course, we had to revisit some favorite spots, too. I was proud of the girls when we went through the jellyfish exhibit: Monkey and Bug were excitedly telling their friends the different species of jellyfish and explaining the whole life cycle. We spent some time in the kids' sections about ocean mammals and the kelp forest. In fact, we got to the kelp forest just in a time to watch a bit of a program with a diver in the tank before we headed for home.

Library Day
We were a bit late for storytime this week, but we made it in time to hear most of the books about growing things. We came home with these books:
The Boy in the Garden
Jungle Baseball Game
Englebert Joins the Circus
Boys' Team
Cat the Cat, Who is That?
The Cardboard Piano
Dig Hole, Soft Mole
Little Flower
Going to the Zoo

We went to the library last week too, but I completely forgot to write about it. I forget the theme for storytime, but we came home with these books:
At the Beach
Out of the Way! Out of the Way!
Argus
Library Mouse: A Friend's Tale
Kathy's Hats: A Story of Hope
Miss Spider's Wedding
Tillie and the Wall
Bringing in the New Year
Have You Ever Done That?

The Three R's
Major milestone for Goose this past week! Early in the week when Daddy was reading them a bedtime story, Goose jumped in to read the word "cat." Daddy told me about it and suggested that she might be ready to start really learning to read instead of just doing the preschool "letter of the week" lessons. I wasn't going to push it (she's only 3!), but I wish you could have seen her little eyes light up when I asked if she was interested! Not only was she interested, but she wanted to start right now! I obliged, of course. She did the first three lessons in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons this week, and she had me do some repetitive reading with her. I read and she repeated Ready, Set, Skip! and Kitty Up! multiple times this week. She was so excited to report to Daddy that she "could really read now!" She also did lots of counting as usual, and I confirmed that she knows the numerals 1-10 out of order.

For reading this week, Bug read Inside, Outside, Upside Down and Are You My Mother?  and Monkey read Where's Spot? and Inside, Outside, Upside Down.

For math, we continued our focus on place value and sums less than 10. I threw in a little work with fractions and occasionally asked them what time it was just to keep those skills fresh. Progress is being made! In fact, by the end of the week, Bug had proved her competency with her place value skills, and I gave her some skip counting connect the dots activities to do instead. Monkey also did some more than/less than problems which helped reinforce the place value knowledge.

For writing this week, Bug continued practicing some problematic letters, and Monkey did a report about armadillos. (For the record, family members, I keep suggesting letter writing as a good project, but nobody's biting. I'll keep trying.) I introduced the concept of spelling as a subject this week. We're not doing spelling lists at this point; I'm just trying to convince them that they are capable of sorting out how to spell some words themselves. They really enjoyed a cut-and-paste activity that had them connecting different beginning sounds to ending syllables (i.e., adding dr, th, s, and w to ink).

Real Greeks
We didn't do any history projects this week, but Monkey and Bug did some ancient-Greece themed coloring sheets while I read to them about famous real Greeks instead of the famous mythical ones. The DK book has a section of blurbs about people in the following categories: statesmen, writers and artists, thinkers, and scientists.

Super Novas
In keeping with our spontaneous science "curriculum" we learned about super novas this week. As we were getting out of the car after Wednesday night church, the girls were asking about stars: How far away are they? What are they made of? And this led to Bug inquiring about what would happen if one exploded. When we got inside, we Googled it, and watched a YouTube video of what does happen when a star goes super nova and admired lots of still shots. Daddy came home at some point in all this and stepped in to help explain things too.