Is It Spring Yet?
While ours friends and family in the South are mostly excited about their snow days, up here in New England we're over it. But it keeps coming! Our library day and Goose's piano lesson had to be rescheduled this week. We attempted to embrace it by using an unexpected snow day to re-watch Frozen. (Cue Bug: "I wish I was Elsa, so I could make all the snow suddenly go away!") Her violin teacher, a long-time resident, assured her that spring should be here in just a few weeks.

Library Day
We didn't have story time this week (due to President's Day, not inclement weather, although that happened too). But we came home with a ton of books!

Mostly, they were random fun selections:
Not a Stick
Clementine and Mungo
Iva Dunnit and the Big Wind
Zara's Hats
Zen Ties
Mirandy and Brother Wind
Babar's Museum of Art
Toot & Puddle: Puddle's ABC

A few from familiar, favorite authors:
The Surprise Party
That Is Not a Good Idea!
Olivia Goes to Venice
Leaf Man

A couple of classic fairy tales:
Swan Lake
The Little Snowgirl

A read-aloud poetry anthology:
Poetry by Heart: A Child's Book (we've been reading a few poems every day; the girls have loved finding the rhyming patterns and figuring out the plays on words)

And Bug decided to attempt another chapter book:
The Boxcar Children (So far, she says she likes it alot better than the Magic Treehouse book; according to Bug, the words are harder to read, but they make a lot more sense--a more challenging vocabulary but with traditional grammar and punctuation.)

Three Rs
For math, we're continuing our focus on math facts (addition for the big girls; number recognition for Goose). The big girls also practiced fractions and skip counting, and I introduced Bug to subtraction with two-digit numbers (no borrowing yet). The girls did quite a bit of puzzle-solving this week too. I printed up some 4x4 Sudoku for them (highly popular) and their Puzzle Buzz magazines came in the mail this week (full of mazes, search & find, word searches, complete the picture, etc.)

For reading this week, Monkey read My First Book of Girl Power, Fancy Nancy: Poison Ivy Expert, and The Surprise Party. Bug read My First Book of Girl Power, then she started The Boxcar Children and got about a chapter and a half in. Goose continued her reading lessons, practicing sounding out skills and added the r letter sound this week.

For writing, all the girls dictated journal entries about our trip to New York City, and the big girls worked on their spellling unit, did a few grammar pages (contractions and adjectives), and completed a worksheet about the beginning, middle, and end of a story.

History
For history this week, we read a bit more in the book about the New York Colony (the handover from the Dutch to the English and the colonists' early struggles for independence from England--about one hundred years before the Revolutionary War). We also watched a couple more episodes of Liberty's Kids (they covered "the shot heard round the world" at Lexington and the Green Mountain Boys taking Fort Ticonderoga).

Music Lessons
Bug was REALLY excited to go back to her violin lesson this week, so she could show her teacher what she'd been practicing and add more skills to work on. Her teacher was very pleased with how well she was doing on the rhythm exercises and her positioning and decided let her jump ahead to start learning the fingerings. He gaver her a few more exercises to practice this week and told her that if she mastered those, he could start teaching her to play a real song, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," next week. As goal-driven as Bug is, I have no doubt that she'll do it--her little eyes lit up when he put that challenge on the table!

Seeing STOMP this past weekend in NYC continues to be a real inspiration for Monkey. She added complexity to her experiments in sound and rhythms thoughout the week. She played with the differences in sound in stomping on hardwood vs. carpet vs. linoleum using barefeet vs. socked feet vs. shoed feet vs. hands (and she pulled Goose into her compositions so she could use more sounds than she could physically make at the same time). She also played with tapping on different objects around the house--cabinet doors, doorknobs and handles, stools, tables, etc. and even added some new beatboxing sounds to her repertoire.

Despite the nasty weather, we still managed to get to church twice to let Goose practice on a real piano before her rescheduled lesson on Saturday. She's been practicing on her paper piano some and I frequently catch her practicing wiggling her fingers one at a time and whispering to herself what notes they play. She may only be four and just starting, but she's already developed a preference for playing the baby grand in the sanctuary instead of the electric keyboard in the fellowship hall. She did really well at her lesson this week. In fact, her teacher decided she would be ready for an additional piano book next week. This week she got two new songs to practice.

Swimming
The girls were not looking forward to their swimming lesson with their teacher this week (poor Goose was in tears--"It's cold and boring!"), but they toughed it out and did everything required of them anyway. They all did fantastic for my day in the pool with them, though. Monkey's confidence in the water has sky-rocketed! She's finally swimming on her own, and doesn't even have to be swimming to me--sometimes she swims from the ladder to another wall or to her kickboard (just doggie paddling with her face above the water at this point, but I'll take what I can get). She also successfully floated on her back solo without freaking out. Goose, on the other hand, is fearless! She can't go very far yet, but she's doing an all-out front stroke with her face in the water. This week she even manage to come up for air and keep going. Bug continues working on her front stroke, back stroke, and diving for rings.