Aunt E Is Here!
This is a particularly exciting visit because Aunt E doesn't actually live in the States anymore, but she's in the country on an extended visiting, traveling around and seeing everybody! The first highlight event of her visit was tea (for the grownups) and Legos (for the kids) with some mutual friends through her church overseas. It's a crazy small world!

We spent that afternoon at the local art museum.
Not only were there several great exhibits inside a really neat building (turn of the century mansion), but this museum has artist bags for kids! Each girl got to borrow a small tote filled with a dozen colored pencils, a sharpener, a clipboard, a stack of sketch paper, and a map of the museum.

Another day we took Aunt E with us to the Cliff Walk. The tide was in this time, so most of the beaches and tidal pools we'd explored last time were underwater. We still had a blast though! It was warmer this time around, and the girls just let their imaginations run wild! Aunt E and I were entertained by the two pirates and one "wild princess" who accompanied us on our walk--complete with imaginary bad guys being fought off with stick swords.

He Is Risen!
Aunt E was here for all the Easter celebrations as well!
We bought fresh flowers to decorate the house. We dyed Easter eggs and shaped bread for Easter breakfast. The shapes (bunnies, crosses, braids, wreaths) were mostly unrecognizable after they cooked, but we had a great time, and they were tasty! (recipe: Pillsbury Italian bread dough, cut into sections and shaped + brushed with egg + sprinkled with cinnamon sugar + baked for 10 minutes = yummy!). The girls received their traditional chocolate bunnies Easter morning and got to dress up in their new dresses for church.

Library Day
We had storytime this week! Miss C presented a great collection of picture books as usual and a few preschool games/activities, and all three girls participated. We came home with these books:

The Firebird
If You Give a Pig a Party
Bear Feels Sick
Miss Lina's Ballerinas and the Prince
A Birthday for Cow!*
The House at the End of Ladybug Lane
The Best Pet of All
Slugs in Love
The Jellybeans and the Big Book Bonanza
A Fabulous Fair Alphabet (letter recognition for Goose)
Custard and Company (poetry)
Sybil's Night Ride (history)
The Seven Seas: Exploring the World Ocean (science/geography)

All three girls still have books to read solo, so none of them checked out their own this week.

Eat Your Frogs!
The girls had fun this week with an e-book on Starfall about idioms. The conversations that followed (what if it really did rain cats and dogs?), served as an excellent segue the girls to the concept of "eating your frogs first"--doing the hardest thing on your to-do list first thing in the morning. Lately, both big girls have had particular lessons that they just dread, so they put it off and put off and don't end up doing it until last when they're tired. It just makes the actual lesson worse. This week I informed them that they would have to eat their frogs! Imagining their tasks as frogs to be eaten changed otherwise stressful encounters into fits of giggles, and the hard things got done. They were still difficult, but discussing the concept with the Mark Twain idiom made them much more fun. I also took the time one-on-one to explain why I make them do these hard things and brainstorm ways to make them easier.

Everybody Loves Diggers!
We came home from running errands one day to discover a dump truck and backhoe had set to work right in front of our house! The girls never did figure out why exactly they were doing this, but the girls were fascinated to watch the workers tear up and repave a small section of our street.

Three Rs
The big girls continue formal lessons as usual, and everyone's making good progress. Since their lessons are amply recorded elsewhere, I won't discuss them much here. (I know the family members who peek at this blog regularly probably doesn't care as much about the nuts and bolts of home schooling anyway.)

Goose's lessons are considerably less formal and barely recorded outside of this blog. So, here's her update: I've basically given up on the Teach Your Child to Read textbook. If she wants to try to swallow the alphabet whole, I'll see what I can do to help! This week I dug up a pre-K workbook that goes through every letter in the alphabet with tracing letters and pictures of objects to color for each letter sound. She did half a dozen or so pages this week. She also practices copying words along with her sisters during their spelling lessons, and they've been good about finding Starfall games/videos she would like. Some review letter sounds, and some read books, highlighting each word as it reads. She's soaking it all up!

Goose counting out loud is pretty much a constant, and she's gotten good at basic addition. On the day we took Aunt E back to the airport, I had the big girls accomplish part of their math lesson by doing flashcards in the back seat, and Goose joined in. They found relatively easy ones to make up her stack.