Friday, January 16, 2015

This was the week I resumed my usual milspouse MO by jumping headlong into a new community: we joined the local Y, attended our first Lego Club event, joined the Chapel's children's choir, started swimming lessons, and had a playdate with a family of fellow military homeschoolers who live down the street from us. Oh, and I had my first evening leading a women's small group Bible study.

Library Day
Once again library day was a huge hit! Bug and Goose were eager participants in story time, and Monkey enjoyed the stories from a distance while setting up a doll house at the toy tables. The standard theme seems to be "books the librarian is excited about today," and it makes for a great story time. The girl's favorite this week seemed to be one about a little boy trying to decide what pet he wanted to have--alligator? elephant? puppy? Of course, we came home with our own little stack of books to read:
Fletcher and the Springtime Blossoms
Harris Finds his Feet
Princess Bess Gets Dressed
I Broke My Trunk!
Pie in the Sky
Rrrralph
Planting the Trees of Kenya

Library day wasn't over yet though! We had signed up for an art lab that afternoon creating tin foil sculptures. Apparently, there were technical difficulties with the supplies, so we didn't get to do that, but the librarian turned it into an impromptu Lego Club event instead, which proved highly popular (we hadn't been able to attend one yet, so this was a fun introduction). Goose was the only little one in attendance, so she had a big bin of Duplos all to herself--she built a playground complete with a climbing wall, playhouse, and riding toys. Monkey and Bug collaborated with a new friend (G who lives down the street) to build a house, complete with furniture.

Swimming Lessons
The Y here actually has swimming lessons for homeschoolers one morning a week. Our friends from the library also attend these, so the girls already had people they knew! Unfortunately, the age 6 and up class only had room for one more. I put Bug in that one since she's the better swimmer, and we got special permission for Monkey to join the preschool class for this session (it's a tiny class, so the teacher should be able to tailor things a bit for her).

Children's Choir
Just this week, the chapel started a children's choir, and the girls did great! Miss C, the worship leader, is teaching them about different notes and how to listen to their voices. They're also going to a learn songs to sing in the service eventually. Everybody hung around afterwards, and the girls got some playtime in with the kids from church. I'm hoping the slew of new friends this week will ease their adjusting to this new location!

Snowy Playdate!
The day of our playdate it actually snowed enough to play with! The girls had fun running through it on our way to G's house, and they stayed outside to make snowballs for a while when we got back home. The playdate itself went beautifully (which is particularly good since Miss K and I discovered we have a lot in common, and these get-togethers over tea are going to continue whether the kids like it or not!).

Three R's
I got the girls work folders started up again this week, so they had regular worksheets to choose from again. I also realized I was getting really bored with worksheets (I imagine they feel the same), so this week I focused on coming up with more not-worksheet math lessons. We did a couple of edible math lessons in which I passed out flashcards and they had to illustrate the problems with Cheerios or Goldfish. Goose participated in these lessons too. I also remembered I had a book full of DIY math games that the big girls are actually hold enough for. This week we tried a card game called Diamond 10 that involved making 10s.

For reading, Bug is working her way through Frog and Toad Together, and Monkey opted to do repeat readings of We Are in a Book! Goose reviewed her sounding out skills and added a new sound to her repertoire--A as in apple.

For writing this week, we finished a spelling unit, did scrambled sentences worksheets, and reviewed nouns and verbs. Bug also created a menu for her pretend restaurant (we didn't bring play food with us, so she created a bunch out of craft supplies), and Monkey completed a "surprise story"--I had her blindly pick a story card, then write a few sentences about it.

History
Our history studies this week involved an intensive study of the Pennsylvania Colony and Philadelphia. We read the rest of the sections in the DK book involving Philadelphia and Valley Forge, I got a kid's non-fiction book about the Pennsylvania Colony, and we read a picture-book biography of Benjamin Franklin. We also watched another episode or two of the Liberty's Kids series that covered events leading up to the war and the occasionally violent disagreements between the colonists themselves.

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