Library Day
Storytime this week proved to be a great disappointment to the girls since it involved only one actual story being read in the whole thirty minutes. The new librarian who does storytime is really into audience participation and hitting lots of preschool skills (good things in general like patterns, counting, colors, etc.), rather than just enthusiastically sharing good books, which is what these girls actual want out of storytime. Bug was the most vehemently frustrated on the way home: "Seriously, why is she a librarian if she doesn't even like books?! She should just teach a music class!" Of course, the library is still the library, and we came home with these great books (mostly pulled from the folktale/fairy tale section because the regular picture book section was even more of a madhouse than usual):
Clever Katya (Russian folktale)
Gift Horse (Native American folktale)
Monkey (a trickster tale from India)
Jabuty the Tortoise (a trickster tale from the Amazon)
How the Gods Created the Finger People (Mayan creation story)
Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters (African folktale)
Gawain and the Green Knight (Arthurian legend)
Jack and the Beanstalk (English fairy tale)
The Egyptian Cinderella (not a retelling of the European Cinderella story; this is actually the true tale of a Greek slave who became Pharoah Amasis's wife)
The Man Who Walked Between the Towers

Bible & Quizzing
Our at home Bible study involved a little research this week. In Goose's Bible storybook we were reading about Moses and the Isrealites, in particular one day the story of Moses hitting the rock to get water. Bug and I both immediately remembered that Moses got in trouble for hitting the rock, which wasn't mentioned. First Bug looked up the given reference in Exodus in her Bible, and we discovered the same happy story from the storybook, but this bothered us (we couldn't both be wrong, could we? That seemed like a weird thing to jointly mis-remember.) Sure enough, a further online search revealed a second similar story in Numbers, but this one involved Moses being reprimanded for hitting instead of just speaking to the rock. Fun Bible trivia learned and good practice in verifying information and doing research--it's a win!

The big girls and I are still reading through the stories of David and selections of his Psalms at home, and they studied Exodus 4 at church and recited Exodus 3:14 as their memory verse. They were also happy to have their little class of 1st - 3rd graders back instead of being in with the big kids.

Art
Here are their creations from class this week:

Swimming
Goose hit a milestone this week: She swam a few strokes to her teacher all by herself! Monkey is continuing to gain more confidence. She's not doing anything solo yet, but she's much more willing to go underwater and stay under for more than a split second. In contrast, Bug was disappointed this week that her teacher didn't have her doing more solo swimming! She's mostly been working on freestyle using a marshmallow floats (looks like a floating bar bell), but she's also practiced the backstroke and a kind of modified breaststroke.

heading into the wilderness of the Pinnacles

The Great Outdoors!

The dark cave beyond them
is the entrance to the second
section of Balcony Caves 

We actually wanted to go camping this weekend, but all the sites close enough were booked or closed, so we went for a day trip hike instead. We headed to West Pinnacles National Park and had a fantastic time! We took a 2 1/2 mile loop trail that involved a bit of spelunking through Balcony Caves. It was awesome! This was not a paved path, clearly lit kind of cave exploration. We had to bring our own flashlights (now very thankful we bought little headlamps for the girls awhile back), and it involved climbing through some pretty tight places.The girls loved it. Even Goose climbed through on her own; she only needed me to adjust her pack a few times, so it would stay out of her way while she was climbing. Climbing through the caves really sparked the girls innate desire to climb, and they did quite a bit bouldering once we got out of the caves (Daddy and I laughed about how many pictures we now have of them triumphantly on top of things).

The girls and Daddy at the top of two of the boulders they conquered.
 I know in the picture on the right they just far away, but that distance is mostly vertical.

Throughout the hike, Monkey and Bug took turns leading us. It was an obvious trail, but it was a fun confidence-boosting exercise to let them be charge, and do things like decide where the best spot for resting and snacking would be.

Three Rs
In math this week Monkey worked on counting money, telling time, creating and reading tables, subtraction, and measurements (we discussed units of length, weight, and volume; she even estimated length using inches with remarkable accuracy). Bug worked on mostly the same things plus we introduced counting by threes this week (she didn't actually choose to the measuring worksheets Monkey did this week, but she was listening in on all the explanations).

They're both continuing to read about Little Bear: Monkey finished Little Bear's Friend, and Bug read The Party at Owl's House and the beginning of Your Friend, Little Bear. We were also very excited about a delivery of seven new books for future reading lessons (including several that are collections of stories; all of the same type as the Little Bear books: Frog and Toad, Frances, etc.)

They finished up their first workbooks of writing sheets this week. Both girls had been putting off the creative writing prompts for last, but they did a great job! They were even proud enough of their one or two sentence stories to read them to Daddy when he got home. They also each completed a journal entry and a spelling list.

Goose and I spent lots of time reading pre-reading skills books this week. Her sisters also jumped in on our building a block town according to a pattern just like some of the characters in her books. She also decided to complete some letter sounds worksheets.