Year-round Learners
Just for the record (and because the topic has been coming up a lot in local social circles), we practice year-round homeschooling for several reasons. The first is simply academic: especially at their young ages when they're just grasping early reading and math concepts, I feel like we'd lose too much ground if we stopped doing lessons for three months. Really, it feels mean to have re-teach them things in the fall that I let them forget by taking such a long break. (Also, I'd probably have a mutiny on my hands if I told them we weren't studying history for the whole summer!) Year-round schooling gives our family much more flexibility too. Since we're not taking three months off at one stretch, we can do things like take a break for a random week in March if Nana comes to visit or a week-long trip to San Diego when Daddy has mandated days to take leave. From my perspective, not following a school schedule really eases a lot of stress. I don't have the year-end crunch to "fit it all in" by summer time--we can just keep working steadily at the pace the girls need. It also frees me to do things like declare that on Thursdays the three Rs will not be covered, because there's just too many other things going on that day right now.

Library Day & Fairy Tales
This week's storytime theme was kittens. They even had one of the librarians in a cat costume to act out one of the books! Perhaps the best part about this week, though, was that the girls were brave enough to sit front and center in with all the other kids instead of huddling by my feet at the edge of the room. After storytime the girls and I found a relatively quiet corner and read a few books ourselves, but we actually didn't check out any books this week. We won't be able to visit the library for the next several weeks, so we decided to focus on digging back into our own shelves chock full of books that we haven't read recently!

Among our many books at home, the entourage was thrilled to discover my copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales and asked if I could read them the real stories about the princesses. So far we've read Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Frog Prince, and Cinderella. We've made some interesting discoveries that certainly downplay the romance of the tales we think we know! For example, Snow White is revived, not by true love's kiss, but because the dwarves drop her coffin and the bit of poisoned apple gets dislodged from her throat. Similarly, the frog prince isn't transformed by a kiss (even an unwilling one), but because the princess throws the poor long-suffering amphibian against a wall! Besides the fun comparative analyses, we faced the truth that princesses are just another character in books--they're not always perfect heroines: sometimes they are the active protagonist (Cinderella), sometimes they're good but passive characters (Snow White), and sometimes they're not nice girls at all (the dancing princesses and the frog-finding princess)!

Viking Raiders
Our viking studies continue! This week we read more Norse mythology, and girls continued their comparisons to the modern Marvel characters. They were disappointed that Thor doesn't have his iron mitt in the modern take and amused that he does appear to have Lady Sif's lovely golden hair! (The mythical Thor had red hair and a full beard.)

While last week we studied everyday Viking clothing, this week we looked at the arms and armor of the Viking raiders. We read the appropriate sections of the Eyewitness book, perused the Viking raiders section of Daddy's bladed weapons book, watched a couple of YouTube videos about viking armor as well as fighting techniques, and finally made our own helmets!

The Three Rs
For reading this week, Bug read Raindrop Plop, Hop on Pop, and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. She also spent one of her lessons sorting rhyming words--she's gotten a lot faster since last time she tried that activity! This week Monkey mastered the words in Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. After Monday's first-day read through, she really likes to gather her sisters and read to them for her lessons. Lots of fun for everybody!

For math this week, Monkey reviewed time and fractions, continued learning her addition math facts and practiced a few problems involving carrying, and did some extra studying of place value (she can read 3-digit numbers now, and we spent some time sorting out fourteen vs. forty, etc.). Bug practiced time, fractions, and addition, practiced skip counting and the 5s and 2s times tables, and did some subtraction (as expected now that she's all but mastered her addition math facts, introduced subtraction was a breeze).

The worksheets continue for writing lessons! Monkey and Bug both completed sheets that involved matching missing letters to their words, unscrambling sentences, and creatively finishing a sentence. They both also enjoyed dictating about our visit to the art museum for their journals this week.

Bikes and Playgrounds
Progress is slow, but the girls are continuing to practice their bikes (Daddy's goal is to get them riding with confidence by the end of the year, and I'm just looking forward to when they get good enough to realize it's fun! At this point they seem to think it's just frustrating and mildly terrifying). They practiced on the sidewalk in front of our house a few times, and one morning this week we met some friends and took over the church parking lot, so the kids could have a little more room to maneuver. Of course, with the church playground right there, the girls didn't actually stay on their bikes for long. They have thoroughly enjoyed all the playground time they've gotten this week. I've tried to be a bit more intentional about finding times--even really brief ones--for them to play since our backyard isn't terribly appealing for a lot of gross-motor play (it's completely bricked and terraced).

Little Artists
We visited the new exhibits at the art museum this week! The first small exhibit was a truly impressive collection of large embroidered portraits. One of the portraits was a modern teenager posed to resemble Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring. I looked up the original painting on my phone, and the girls and I briefly took over the gallery bench to compare the two. The next exhibit featured the works of female artists from the local youth art collective. This exhibit also included head shots of each of the artists, and the girls loved being able to see who they actually are. The last and largest exhibit featured the works of a travelling artist from the late 1800s. His works included woodblock prints, pencil sketches, and paintings, and of course we talked about the various methods. The content of his paintings covered a wide and fascinating spectrum. Some of them were monthly magazine covers (the girls discussed why he chose particular things to illustrate the given month), many were newsprint illustrations and drawings of the Western expansion (we remembered back to our studies of the pioneers and Laura Ingalls Wilder and compared his renderings of cities like San Francisco to our own visit there), one wall featured paintings of Colorado (we're planning a roadtrip there, and the girls are looking forward to seeing some of those landscapes for themselves), and finally one gallery included a whole series of paintings of Hawaiian volcanoes at night that the girls were particularly fascinated by. The girls had decided to bring their art kits with them, so after we toured the museum, we settled into the benches in the volcano gallery to create some "inspired by" art work of their own. Eventually Monkey asked permission to wander the other gallery on the same floor by herself and settled in to copy a painting of a California farmhouse.