"I Like to Move It! Move it!"
Besides the fact that they love this song and have had a number of living room dance parties lately, these girls are always active.
They continue to practice on their bikes, and Monkey conquered hers first! Daddy put the pedals back on, and she's now whizzing up and down our street. (We knew she feeling confident when she started trash talking Daddy as she zipped by.) Bug has made a lot of progress, and she's almost ready for pedals (the fact that Monkey did it first has been a character-building experience). Goose is finally managing to coast a little! Since she's starting off so much younger, I think she'll stick with the balance bike longer than the other two.
They are loving having an actual playground at church again. Goose has been working hard on conquering the monkey bars, and she can almost make it all the way across! Monkey and Bug on the other hand have taken to using the top of the monkey bars as balance beams. Also, they can now climb all the way up the supporting poles of the swing set. Nobody has fallen off of either of those . . . yet.
In case you weren't aware we have a runner on our hands! Goose joined Daddy for one of his running club events this week, and she ran 2 miles without stopping or walking! Fellow runners on the rec trail were very impressed that such a tiny person had the endurance to run so far, and she got a lot of encouraging comments from female runners in particular. She's ready to go again!
We finally made it to the neighborhood pool this week! The girls had a blast practicing their swimming skills again--particularly since we happened to run into some friends of ours while we were there. Goose was a little nervous about getting in initially, but once she hit the water, she was fine.
Green! Yellow! Red!
I decided to tackle nutrition for our next science/health topic, and the girls have really gotten into this one. We checked out several books over the past couple of weeks: The Edible Pyramid (a picture book featuring a cafe whose menu is based on the food pyramid), Eat Healthy, Feel Great (picture book featuring the green light, yellow light, red light method of categorizing which foods we should or shouldn't eat much of), and Vitamins are Vital (this books gets into specific vitamins and minerals we need, what they do, and what foods we need to eat to get them). Bug actually read the Eat Healthy book on her own before I could get to it during our reading time, and spent an entire dinner time excitedly telling us about everything she had learned! (Wow! She's crossed that learn-to-read/read-to-learn milestone! Yippee! As a home school parent, it was a very validating moment!). They've taken to evaluating most of our meals, and they've been pleased that we eat predominately green light foods. The real score-one-for-good-parenting moment was a conversation I overheard happening in the backseat on the way home from a church night activity: Both big girls had won candy has prizes for answering questions, but they realized that they had already had ice cream and a cookie that day, so they decided to save the candy to be a treat for a different day.
Originally unrelated to this topic but dovetailing nicely, the girls have started helping me meal plan. (I was feeling bored and frustrated with the process, so I pulled them into it, much to their excitement.) So far each girl has had one opportunity to plan a meal and be the primary person to cook it (I'm constantly available to help of course). Their menus so far:
- Bug: meatloaf, carrot sticks, mashed sweet potatoes
- Monkey: beef tacos with lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese on top, refried beans, guacamole and chips, watermelon
- Goose: personalized pita pizzas (topping options included pepperoni, sausage, ham & pineapple) and plums
Loving our Neighbor
It's one of those "this is why I love home schooling" moments: One day this week we chose to set aside our academic lessons in favor of a hands-on one about loving our neighbor. A neighborhood friend of ours with an infant and a toddler experienced a minor medical emergency that required an overnight hospital stay. The day after she was discharged we spent the morning with them at the park (so the girls could chase 2-year-old A, and I could hold the baby while Miss H and I chitchatted). We went our separated ways so the toddler and my trio could get a quiet time, then we picked up the toddler for the afternoon, so Miss H and the baby could get nice long naps until Mr. A got home. The girls and I had discussions about why we were setting aside our own plans for the day, why Miss H needed to rest even though she was feeling better, and the kind of things they would need to do to take care of A (what toys were appropriate, what areas of the house she could go in, etc.). They were very excited about taking on such a responsibility (supervised, of course).
History & Geography
We're still watching Liberty's Kids. Recent episodes featured frontier life, American Indian relations with the British and Americans, and John Paul Jones.
We're continuing to work our way through the states, and we've covered Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, and Indiana (they've been to 4 of those).
By happenstance, we've been learning about some international countries and cultures as well through the girls library book choices of both contemporary and classic stories. Recently the following book choices have led to learning a bit about the following countries:
Max's Magic Seeds and La La Rose (France)
Uno, Dos, Tres, One, Two, Three and Poco Loco (Mexico)
How Many Days to America and Mama Does the Mambo (Cuba)
The Pink Fairy Book (Japan and Denmark)
The Moon Lady (China)
Mama's Saris (India)
The Three Rs
Yep, those are still happening. We finally got binders and pencil cases again, which the girls are pretty excited about. Now I just need to get my act together and finish filling them! The big girls are continuing to read books, work on their workbooks, and this week do a little free writing. Monkey has been writing about her favorite characters from the Harry Potter books, and Bug has been making up little stories and illustrating them.
We found a couple of workbooks for Goose that's she's already started on--one is a pre-k workbook about same and different (this helps with math, reading, and writing skills) and one is a kindergarten addition workbook, which I'm hoping will satisfy her request for more challenging worksheets (for the record, the Target dollar bins have awesome workbooks). She's continuing to read Go, Dog, Go! She's made it all the way through the book twice, I think, with a lot of repeat reading and an increasing amount of sight reading of particularly common words. I also printed up a bunch of little cards with the vocabulary from the book printed on them. She's enjoyed playing around with those--finding ones she can read and creating her own phrases.
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