It's Raining!
First thing Thursday morning, once the entourage had the chance to rub the sleep out of their eyes, I urgently whispered, "Listen!" They froze attentively, and you could see realization and excitement spread across their little faces: "IT'S RAINING!!" Seriously, when you live in an area affected by severe drought, this is an event that generates snow-in-the-Southeast kind of excitement in small children. They ate a quick breakfast, donned bathing suits, dug up umbrellas and an old raincoat, and had a blast! There were puddles to splash in! Water falling from the roof to catch in buckets! So much fun!

Walk Like an Egyptian
You know an era in history is really sinking in when it shows up with relative accuracy in their pretend play. One day this week, while the girls were putting away their laundry, they were pretending they were servants in Pharaoh's household. Then, they decided that they were actually Pharaoh's daughters, and we all piled into the royal chariot to go to their favorite spot to swim in the Nile (we got in the car and drove to swimming lessons). They decided the drive wasn't quite exciting enough, so they pretended we were being attacked by Vikings ("Would it be Vikings, Mom? Were they at the same time?" "No, sweetie, probably the Ancient Greeks." "Oh, ok.")

The girls also took the initiative on what we would study about Ancient Egypt this week: clothes and jewelry. We've looked at enough books that both big girls had ideas of their own for costumes, so they asked if we could read specifically about clothes and jewelry and if I could
help them make the costumes. I was more than happy to help them out! They had some great ideas for clothes involving repurposing maxi skirts and a chiton from our Ancient Greek studies. I also found ideas online for creating jeweled collars and armbands using paper plates and toilet paper tubes.

They spontaneously started building pyramids out of Legos too.
They even put a couple of Lego figures inside to be the pharaohs.

We exhumed our apple mummy this week too!

The Three Rs
Our history studies weren't the only area in which the girls took some ownership of their education. We've always carefully watched their developmental levels and personal interests and given them lots of choices on the theory that this would happen. Hooray! It works! Homeschooling win!

Monkey is finally motivated to improve her handwriting, and this week she requested tracing sheets for particular lower case letters that were causing her trouble: a, y, g, q, r, and m. She carefully and enthusiastically traced these letters maybe twenty times each, and the improvements were clear in her other work this week! Bug actually chose to do a story starter page this week. Getting her to finish the creative writing activities in the last writing folder was a real battle, but she had fun with this one! She was given a picture and a question (How will the hedgehog carry this big mushroom home?). Her answer: "She put the basket down, and she pulled the mushroom up, and she put it on her head." She was very proud of both coming up with a solution and with being able to spell a lot of the words on her own (or at least by referring to the written question instead of me). This activity also led us to discuss and demonstrate the usefulness of a dictionary since she and I disagreed on how to spell something. The issue was accurately resolved, and she spent some time flipping through the kids dictionary (Thank you, Grandma & Granddad!). This week I also introduced both girls to the joy of diagramming (yes, Mommy is a grammar nerd). They're just doing simple two word sentences themselves, but they picked out some longer sentences from one of their books to watch me diagram. Bug in particular is intrigued by these "puzzles."

This week Monkey read "Duck, Babysitter" and started reading "The Party at Owl's House." Bug read A Kiss for Little Bear, "What Will Little Bear Wear?" and "Birthday Soup." I think it finally clicked with Bug that she really can read! One day this week she emerged triumphantly from quiet time having read about 75 pages in a Dick and Jane treasury. She asked me for a bookmark and continued reading it throughout the week.

Both girls chose several telling time pages among their math worksheets this week, and I finally feel like we made some real progress! They can both draw in the correct hands on a clock if given a digital time at least. Bug also worked on counting coins, estimating and measuring with inches and centimeters, and counting by 3s. Monkey also worked on double digit addition, subtraction, counting money, fractions, and counting by 5s and 10s (counting by 10s was at her request--the sheets weren't in her folder, but she asked if she could practice those too, since it'd been awhile. Absolutely!)

Library Day
After last week's dissatisfaction with storytime, I gave the girls the option to go to the library a different day. Our plan to avoid a storytime crowd backfired a bit though, when we arrived to discover that Friday mornings are apparently baby storytime and the children's picture book section was quite literally crawling with kids. We decided to retreat to the Juvenile section reading room for own reading time and made occasional forays into the folktale and picture book section to acquire more books. We came home with these books:
The Legend of the Golden Snail
Whose Chick Are You?
The Complete Story of the Three Blind Mice
Does a Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too?
Tyrone the Horrible
Amelia Bedelia
Once upon a Cloud
The Story about Ping
Pig-Boy: A Trickster Tale from Hawaii
Cinderella

Art
This week was the last art session. The girls had so much fun getting to experiment with painting techniques and got some good practice in making quick, temporary friends (between being military kids and home schoolers this is a crucial life skill).

Goose's artwork

Bug's artwork

Monkey's artwork

Swimming
This was the last week of the current session, but I immediately signed them up for the next one, which they're pretty excited about. They were anxious to get their check lists and certificates on Wednesday to find out how they did. Goose should technically have advanced to Otter since she completed all the exit skills for Angelfish; however, there's a waitlist for every single Otter class in the next session. I think Goose has gained enough confidence that being in Angelfish again won't hold her back. (Plus, from what I've seen the teachers of the preschool classes are pretty good about tailoring to suit the skills of the kids regardless of the level.) Monkey will be a Goldfish again--she still has a lot to work on (I think she and Goose are at about the same skill level at this point). Bug actually got demoted to Goldfish, which was disappointing, but we talked about it and decided it was probably for the best. Bug's skill level definitely fits within the description of the Penguin class given in the catalog, but the reality is that she was in a class with a bunch of 9-12 year olds who'd obviously been swimming with confidence for awhile now. (Obviously, corrections need to be made to either the descriptions or the class make-up.) It boiled down to her continuing to be a struggling Penguin or her being an advanced Goldfish, and her teacher thought she'd benefit more from the latter.

Little Architect
In case you were wondering, Bug's love of buildings and architecture are still going strong! She's been drawing house plans on the white board lately.