Before-We-Move List

The climbing wall was definitely the big girls'
favorite part of the playground.

Now that we’re already packing up boxes and the cross-country move seems imminent, the girls have been coming up with things they want to make sure we do before we leave. It actually worked out for us to do several of those this week. First, we visited the huge playground across town. (It’s not a usual destination because it’s big enough and they’re small enough that I can’t just let them run wild—I actually have to keep up them and keep them relatively together.) They had a blast of course! It includes things like a long, wobbly bridge 10 feet off the ground, tunnels through hills, a shrubbery maze, several climbing walls, and of course, the typical climb-and-slide structures.

 Next, we spent an afternoon at the aquarium. As usual we arrived with a mission (or two or three): The big girls each needed to pick a critter to research and write a report on while we were there (just a sentence or two). Monkey picked black sea nettles, and Bug chose penguins. Goose can’t write, of course, but she brought a bag with a clipboard paper and crayons, too, and drew pictures of jellyfish while Monkey wrote her paper. I also printed up a photo checklist of about a dozen species for the girls to look for and check off once found. We didn’t actually find everything, but it helped give some direction to our wanderings.

 

The girls love the glass room where the waves crash over them!

Somehow we missed this exhibit on other visits:
an open air nature center with local fish and small coastal birds.

At the end of the week, we were hit by a “heat wave” of 80 degrees. (The equivalent of a nice cool summer day in our previous location!) We put off our lessons until Saturday and hit the beach! Granted, the West Coast water is still frigid, but at least frigid was a little more welcome this time around. The highlight of this particular beach outing was Bug’s major project: digging a hole. Not just any hole—a hole deep enough to cover Goose almost up to her waist! She was very excited that she dug deep enough to have water seeping in from the surrounding sand (“Mommy! I dug a well!”) and the fact that we could see our reflections in it clearly.

Library Day

We actually succeeded in finding a library time that

Playing with magnetic shapes at the library: Goose is building
a small box and Monkey and Bug are contemplating plans to
build a bigger rocket.

didn’t coincide with a story time! We had the kids’ section essentially to ourselves. The girls got to do puzzles, play with building toys, have plenty of room to spread out, and enough quiet to read books. (We discovered that the library is a popular afterschool hangout location for the teen crowd, but of course they didn’t venture into the children’s section.) We came home with these books:

Chester

Dear Mrs. LaRue: Letters from Obedience School

“Slowly, slowly, slowly,” Said the Sloth

Maybelle, the Cable Car

The Popcorn Dragon

Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping

Hello, Arctic!

Komodo!
Meeow and the Little Chairs

A Treeful of Pigs

Father Bear Comes Home (This book is actually for Bug’s reading lessons for next week, since her competency level is high enough to accommodate library book due dates.)

Three Rs

For reading, Monkey finished “The Party at Owl’s House” and began “Your Friend, Little Bear.” Bug read “Little Bear Goes to the Moon” and “Little Bear’s Wish” and started reading Danny and the Dinosaur. They’ve both also recently had fun scouring cereal boxes for words they can sight read.

I already mentioned the report I had them write at the aquarium for one of their writing lessons. Also, in addition to the usual spelling unit (which they struggled with this week; next week is going to be a review session), they learned the basic rules of capitalization. Being the grammar geek that I am, I taught them proper proofreading marks instead of making them rewrite entire sentences just to capitalize someone’s name the way the worksheets asked (I’m not a fan of busy work). They both get the concepts; now it’s just a matter of enforcing it in their everyday writing. They both enjoyed doing journal entries this week too, and dictating very enthusiastically about our visit to the beach.

For math this week, Monkey worked on addition, creating and reading bar graphs, concepts of units of time (would you measure particular events in seconds, days, years, etc.), and we introduced counting by 2s. Bug worked on multiplying by 2 and 3, addition, and fractions.

At this point Goose’s lessons are still optional, and this week she politely declined them every day. Of course, that hardly means she wasn’t learning. We read tons of books, she practiced counting and simple addition just in the course of everyday activities (like figuring out how many big and little forks and plates we need at dinner), and she’s been practicing writing the letters in her name (for some reason, getting them right side up is an issue, but we’ll get that sorted out).