Unhappy Snow Days
Newly discovered quirk of homeschooling: official snow days are a cause for disappointment, not excitement. In fact, the novelty of snow has so worn off for the entourage that a newly fallen blanket of white on Monday morning was met with outraged cries: "It snowed again?!" You see, when we're actually snowed in we do our formal lessons as usual. What we don't get to do is our usual out-and-about activities--in this case library day and children's choir.

Children's choir at least was rescheduled for Wednesday evening, because the kids are singing in church next weekend. Goose and Bug were fantastic during practice and are both excited about sing with the praise band. Monkey was feeling uncooperative, but I'm praying her sisters' enthusiasm with rub off by next Sunday!

Music Lessons
Bug was beyond thrilled to start her violin lessons this week! She arrived having already memorized the parts of her violin and bow and carefully studied the photos of proper positioning. Mr. D was very impressed. They breezed through what he expected to be the entire first lesson in just a few minutes, and by the end of her 30 minute lesson she was several weeks ahead of where he anticipated! He sent her home with a rhythm excercise involving all four strings to practice, and she has practiced it forwards and backwards at varying speeds. She also studied the photos of fingerings and has been experimenting with that as well.

Goose's second piano lesson was a success! She was shy for a minute or two, but she warmed up quickly this time. She added notes A and E, and learned the beginnings of reading music--where all those notes are on the staff and about quarter, half, and dotted half notes. Dr. J sent her home with four short songs to work on. Of course, we don't have a piano at home to practice on yet, and we can't get to the church every day. So, we borrowed an idea from a picture book we read months ago and a made a keyboard out of construction paper for Goose to practice with. She was quite excited with the finished product!

Poor Monkey was feeling extremely left out since we still haven't located a drum teacher. Instead she and I spent some time looking up videos on YouTube: a beginner snare drum warm-up exercise, a snare drum battle between a couple of middle-schoolers, a Navy vs. Army drumline battle, and a soloist with a full drum kit. Then she spent some time with a wooden stool and a couple of pencils experimenting with her own rhythms and practicing keeping a steady rhythm.

Three Rs
The big girls read lots of Fancy Nancy this week; although, I'll confess at this point I don't actually remember who read which books. I also overheard both girls reading other books on their own and to Goose--that's what I'm calling real sucess! Goose didn't add any new letters this week during her reading lessons, but she's been practicing her letter recognition by finding the letters of her piano notes on signs everywhere we go! (At this rate, I think she might fluently read music significantly sooner than she can fluently read books. I've decided I'm ok with that.)

For writing, Monkey and Bug started a new spelling unit, completed several grammar worksheets (about adjectives, verbs, and adverbs), and all three girls composed stories using the story cards. As part of the story cards exercise, we also talked about how stories have a beginning, middle, and end and practiced identifying those sections in stories they're familiar with.

The big girls continued doing timed drills for math, and even Monkey did a few of the +4, 5, 6 pages. Bug is intent on beating her own time for the harder drills. For Monkey focus and efficiency are still an issue: This week I collected one of her drills to discover she'd taken the time to draw cute little smiley faces in many of the numbers and even turned a 3 into a fire-breathing dragon. It took her forever, but her math was flawless. (Cue Bug: "You're not going to get faster, when you do that.") They also practiced subtraction, fractions, and place value. Goose continues to practice counting and number recognition.

History
We did begin reading a book about colonial New York, but most of what I'd consider our history readings for this week were much more recent than the Revolutionary War. We also read about the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Empire State Building as preparation for our trip to NYC over the long weekend. That trip deserves its own write-up--hopefully to be posted very soon.