Library Day
Another fun day at the library this week! We came home with even more books than usual. First, the girls picked out a bunch of picture books just for fun:
I'm Dirty
Are You a Horse?
Grandfather's Trolley
The Other Dog
The Story of the Tooth Fairy
Max & Ruby's Bedtime Book

Then Monkey and Bug rediscovered the Easy Reader section (much more interesting now that they can read more independently). They picked out three books to add to their stack for reading lessons:
Little Bear's Visit
Fancy Nancy, Poison Ivy Expert
Snow

From the Juvenile Non-Fiction section, we came home with:
Who Built the Pyramids? (picture book style explanation of the process of building a pyramid)
The Tomb of the Boy King (the discovery of King Tut's tomb told with pictures and poetry)
Missing Mittens (a fun story counting book that gets discusses even and odd numbers)
The Picture World of Space Shuttles (Monkey's request as a follow-up to the discussion described below)

Into the Wild Blue Yonder!

Monkey is very proud of her shuttle!

We followed a fun tangent one morning this week that I'd classify as science/history. Monkey and Bug were playing astronauts early this week: Monkey built a very elaborate space shuttle out of Legos over the course of several days, Bug built a Lego moon rover, and they declared the top of their dresser the International Space Station. At some point, one of them wanted to verify that people really had walked on the moon. I said yes, asked if they wanted to see the recording of it, and off we went. I looked up the clip on British Pathe (a YouTube channel that has thousands of newsreel clips from the last hundred years or so--really awesome collection). Watching the clip of Neil Armstrong's moon walk led to watching footage of Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space) which led to watching the Wright brothers first flight ever, which led Bug to note that you couldn't possibly fly that airplane over the ocean. This of course led us to watching clips of Charles Lindbergh's first ever trans-Atlantic flight (the girls noticed the jump in technology--one prop, one set of wings, actual walls and windows, etc.), which led to questions about how long it took, which led to watching footage of the Concord (the first aircraft to break the sound barrier), which somehow led us back to space shuttles. We finished by watching the launch and landing of the Discovery shuttle. Of course, this whole experience was peppered with more questions than I can possibly remember to write down, but I did my best to answer. I also tried to tie down the timeline for them by linking different events to their personal family history (i.e., Lindbergh made his famous flight when their great-grandparents were babies, Armstrong landed on the moon when their grandparents were big kids, and the Discovery first launched when I was a preschooler).

We followed all that up over the next several days with a book from the library about space shuttles and two documentaries: All About Space Shuttles with Hard Hat Harry and Shuttle Discovery's Last Mission (it actually covered the entire history of the Discovery but had a special focus on getting the Discovery to it's final home at the Smithsonian).

The Three Rs
Now that we've moved our library day to a different day, Thursdays aren't so crazy busy anymore, and for the past couple of weeks I've done "special lessons" on Thursdays. This week, I had a scrambled word game for them to practice their spelling words, we zipped through a bunch of addition flash cards, and had a white board lesson about vowel teams that make the first vowel say its name (ee, ea, oa, etc.). These pairings consistently trip up the girls during regular reading lessons, so I decided a designated review of them was in order.

For regular lessons this week, Monkey read "What Will Little Bear Wear" and most of "Birthday Soup." She also successfully read the word problem on one of her math sheets this week--it included some tricky words too! Bug read "Father Bear Comes Home," "Hiccups," and "Little Bear's Mermaid." She also read the first chapter of Penny and Her Doll. She's been reading some other books on her own just for fun (hooray!), but I don't keep track of those.

For writing lessons, Bug did worksheets about capitalization and nouns & verbs, while Monkey did several story starter sheets. They worked together to write sentences using their spelling words from this week, and they both dictated journal entries. (Not to mention all the writing they do in Bible quizzing.)

For math lessons, Monkey worked on fractions, addition, subtraction, telling time, and counting by 5 (Fun moment: when Daddy was supervising math lessons one day this week, he peaked over Monkey's shoulder and complimented her perfect work so far. She nodded matter-of-factly, "Yep, I'm really good at math.") Bug worked on fractions, subtraction, making & reading graphs, and measuring weight, length, and volume.

Goose continues listening to lots of books (read by both me and her sisters), counting random things as well as useful things like how many forks we need for dinner, assessing shapes and colors, staging elaborate pretend play (both with her sisters and solo), singing preschool songs or songs of her own invention, etc. And of course, she's frequently listening in on what her sisters are doing and just soaking it all up!

At left, Monkey and Bug pose at the bottom of a climbing wall at the gym Daddy took them to this week.
At right, while they were gone, Goose absolutely loved getting the playground (especially the swings) all to herself!

Quick Updates

• At church the girls (all three of them) are still studying Exodus, and Monkey and Bug memorized Psalm 24:1. At home we finished the stories about Solomon and started reading about Elijah.
• In history we're still reading through the Eyewitness Egypt book. This week we covered the sections: Weapons of War, Sailing on the Nile, Buying and Selling, An Egyptian Carpenter, and Hunting, Fishing, and Fowling.
• Jujutsu continues, and I think they're enjoying their newly-minted yellow belt status.
• Swimming lessons this week went really well. Bug swam the width of the pool solo several times! Monkey and Goose can both float by themselves, and they're all working hard!