San Diego!
Daddy had this past week off, and we decided to take the entourage to San Diego. These girls have really become amazing travelers! Let's start with the fact that preparing for the trip meant me writing an illustrated packing list on their white board and passing out their individual duffel bags. Monkey and Bug packed their own bags, and Bug (our resident fashionista) helped Goose put her outfits together. I didn't even double check to make sure they had everything before we left (granted, I meant to, but it just didn't happen, and they were fine!) Then they spent the entire day (going and returning) cheerfully entertained in the back seat with a backpack of action figures they packed themselves, a tote bag of magazines and notepads with a baggie of crayons, a trio of magnadoodles, a couple of Spanish DVDs, and their current favorite movie--Mulan. I'm also loving the fact that we've reached the stage where we can travel without the hassle of a stroller or diapers! They are all real troopers about spending most of the days walking around, too. We were able to spend three full days exploring the city, and here are the highlights:

San Diego Zoo: We couldn't possibly visit San Diego without spending a day at the zoo! We started off our visit with a 30 minute tour on a double decker bus--sitting in the open top, of course. Next--and probably even more popular--we took the Skyfari (aerial tram) to the far end of the zoo to get to the animals we wanted to see most. Our top priority animals were the arctic animals and the panda bears since the zoo near our last house didn't have those. We also toured the apes and monkeys exhibits and the big animals (big cats, elephants, hippos, etc.). Of course, the girls spent time climbing on all the statue animals too!

(Left) Our little monkeys watching the zoo monkeys. (Center) The entourage pretending to be polar bear cubs.
(Right) Bug and Goose enjoying the Skyfari! Monkey is in the tram behind them with Daddy.

U.S.S. Midway: We were seriously impressed with our tour of this decommissioned air craft carrier. It featured very well done exhibits of this "floating city" and a flight deck full of sample aircraft from WWII through Desert Storm, some of which we could even enter. It had a family audio tour that Monkey and Bug could listen to as well, and they participated in the Junior Pilot Program--answering about a dozen questions in their booklets as we progressed through the ship and getting their wings pinned on by one of the veterans volunteering at the information desk. Daddy and the big girls took an additional tour of the island to see the bridge and air traffic control. Goose was too short to go, so she and I spent some extra time exploring the aircraft she could board and just running around the flight deck. This stop in San Diego was particularly special to us, because Granddad was a medical officer on board just a few years before it decommissioned. That made it especially fun to tour the sick bay and to see what the officers' racks and mess hall were like.

Little fighter pilots!

(Left) We got to board a troop carrier helicopter. (Top right) Monkey and Bug did the island tour with Daddy and pretended to be air traffic controllers. (Bottom right) Monkey and Bug filled out their worksheets to qualify for their Junior Pilot wings, while Goose looks on.

During the Midway tour we got to see the kind of rack we think Granddad had and one of the medical exam rooms he worked in.

Old Town: We ended up spending 6 hours on the Midway (and could have spent more), so we didn't have as much time to explore Old Town as we would have liked, and unfortunately, we missed most of the historical re-enactors in the "Birthplace of California," the site of the first permanent Spanish settlement in the state. It includes a plaza surrounded by restored historic buildings--some are set up as living history museums and others have been turned into fun little shops and restaurants. We poked around for a while, then had dinner at a nice Mexican place.

SeaWorld: The girls loved SeaWorld! We skipped the touch tank/aquarium pieces, since we have a such an awesome aquarium close to home, but we did lots of rides and shows! The dolphin show actually featured more human acrobats than dolphins, but they did some pretty impressive stunts in fun bird-themed costumes. The sea lions and otters had a tv-show themed comedy show that was quite entertaining. We managed to arrive early enough for the orca show to sit just at the edge of the splash zone--great views. In between catching the shows we spent lots of time in the Sesame Street themed amusement park (three rides plus a huge bounce house and climbing play space). Monkey and Bug were even brave enough to go on the teacup ride all by themselves (unfortunately, they weren't actually strong enough to spin it by themselves, and they decided it's a lot more fun when Mommy or Daddy come too). Monkey and Bug also got to go with Daddy on a helicopter simulation ride (Goose and I joined them in the beluga whale exhibit once they exited) and tube-style rapids ride (Monkey and Bug were less than thrilled with this one because "Daddy told us we'd get wet, but he didn't tell us we'd get super wet!" Apparently, that's an important distinction.) Unfortunately, Goose--our little thrill seeker--is still too short to go on the "big rides"--a source of serious disappointment on several occasions. She even wanted to go on the Manta roller coaster with Daddy!

(Left) The girls watching beluga whales. (Center) Shamu! (Right) The entourage on their favorite ride--the spinning "tea cups."

Miss K! To wrap up our San Diego vacation, we went out to dinner with Miss K, our babysitter from our last duty station who just happens to attend college in San Diego! The girls were pretty excited about sushi and yakisoba followed by ice cream, and Miss K was thrilled to escape cafeteria food for an evening. It was fun to catch up with her, and the girls loved playing with her in the courtyard of the restaurant for a little while.

Greek Fashion
We started off our week with a foray into ancient Greek fashion. We read the appropriate section of the Eye Witness book and perused the book for additional samples. Tradition chitons turned out to be incredibly easy to make! Two rectangles of fabric, a handful of safety pins, a belt and--voila!--outfit complete!

We also read the Eye Witness section about food (while we did feast last Friday, we didn't actually read up on the food specifically). Another day we settled in for a long cozy teatime and read a wide selection of Aesop's fables and Heracles stories. The fables, of course, led to lots of good discussions about what lessons the stories are teaching. We wrapped up our history studies this week by watching the DVD about ancient Greece that we got from the library. It covered a lot of aspects of life in ancient Greece, and the girls got to see video of actual ruins along with replicas and reenactments of things like the Olympic games (not entirely historically accurate as the athletes were, thankfully, fully clothed for the video).

Library Day
The theme for storytime was mysteries, and the books read all involved questions being asked or things not being what they seemed (e.g., It Looked Like Spilled Milk). The girls played cheerfully alongside some other kids afterward and picked out lots of books for us to bring home:
Once There was a Bull . . . Frog
An Edible Alphabet
Are We There Yet, Daddy?
The Queen of France
You're Finally Here!
Lolly-pops
Count Down to Clean Up!
Scaredy Squirrel Makes a Friend
When the Teddy Bears Came
You're Mean, Lily Jean!
Felix Feels Better
Sumo Mouse
(Note: I very rarely pick out the books to take home now. All three girls have gotten to be pretty excited about picking out their own books. Goose picks things off the shelf at random, but Monkey and Bug seem to have gotten a little more distinguishing in their choices. I've no idea what their criteria is, but not every book that comes off the shelf gets put in our bag now.)

Three Rs
Math for Monkey and Bug involved more work on telling time and simple fractions (they can now add up things like 1/4 + 1/4 = 1/2), and continuing to work on adding multi-digit numbers (they were very excited to discover some Starfall games that work on this skill this week too). I realized some of the Starfall games they were trying to play also involved subtraction, so we did a lesson on that as well. They both grasped the concept pretty quickly (really it's a just a matter of their remembering that "-" means "take away"). Bug is still practicing skip counting and working on memorizing the 5 times table. Goose is still practicing counting through some picture books, worksheets, and just spontaneously counting objects.

For reading the big girls are still having fun picking through our collection of easy readers, and they were thrilled to discover a new Bob book easy reader at the library, which they both read through on Friday. Bug has also really enjoyed reading familiar books to Goose--fun for all! Goose learned the letter H this week and mostly wanted to repeat the activity of thinking up things that start with H and having me draw them on the white board. Monkey and Bug always get in on this too.

To practice writing this week, both girls wanted to answer question pages: Bug wanted to practice Bible quizzing (she did the stories of Moses and Jonah this week), and Monkey wanted to learn about sea animals (conveniently enough, before our visit to the aquarium, so she was feeling very knowledgeable about the jellyfish and octopuses). Monkey also spent some time practicing her name and a few other random words she wanted to spell.

To the Aquarium!
The girls and I spent a fantastic afternoon at the aquarium this week! (That membership card is going to get lots of use.) It's a huge place, so we just focused on a few highlights: We arrived just in time for the Albatross Encounter and got to meet the only albatross living in captivity (she was rescued as a chick after a wing injury). Then we headed to the exhibit about jellyfish to complete a kind of scavenger hunt. The aquarium's website has tons of printable activities; this one had labeled photos of different species of jellyfish for the girls to identify and check off as they found them. The girls could usually do this based on differences in physical details without my having to tell them the species name first.


playing in the tidal pools and climbing into a life-size giant clam

Then we headed for the hands-on kids section that had been too crowded to enter last time we were there. They loved it! They got to climb through "kelp forest" and "coral reef" play spaces that included tiny screens with videos of the kind of creatures that would live there, they played with plastic fish and boats in a "tidal pool" complete with regularly occurring waves and "rocks" they could rearrange to study the affects of the waves, they dressed up in sea life costumes, they made crayon rubbings of pictures of different local species of sea life, listened to the noises of things like seals, dolphins, and whales and tried out the movements of flippers and fins. Before we left we made it to the penguin feeding and Q & A session. In addition to all the typical adult members of the rookery, they had an adolescent penguin who still had her baby feathers and an adult penguin in the process of molting.

A "Life Skills" Day
On Tuesday this week, I decided the girls and I needed to take a mini-break from the usual academics and regroup. Once we finished the usual morning routine, I let the girls bake a batch of brownies, and I really did little more than read them the recipe and supervise--they found all the ingredients and measuring spoons/cups and did all the measuring, dumping, and mixing. Bug even cracked the eggs, and Monkey assisted Goose with running the electric mixer. While those were cooling off, we walked down to the local craft store (can I tell you how excited I am that we can walk there?!), where we perused the shelves for future project ideas and bought the couple of things we'd come in for.

We returned home to consume our brownies and

a pot of tea, while discussing the current state of the entourage's education. We talked about what they're learning now, what they like that we do, what they don't like, how we might improve things, and if they had any particular requests for things they'd like to learn or do. I know they're only 5, 5, and 3, but it's still a productive meeting. Granted Goose mostly enjoyed the fact that I let her eat two brownies right before lunch, but Monkey and Bug had some really good things to contribute. Monkey requested that we do more projects for history again (she's absolutely right; I've been a complete slacker on that front for our unit about the pioneers). Bug asked that we start practicing for Bible quizzing, so she'll feel ready when they're big enough to do that at church (they'll start in the fall). Far be it from me to turn down a kid's request to dig deeper into the Bible! Bug also restated her desire to learn to knit. Then we brainstormed ideas for good writing assignments, reading options, and field trips. Besides teaching them how to evaluate their goals and activities, it's always helpful to get their buy-in for what they're learning.

The afternoon involved actually teaching Bug to knit. She's been begging me to teach her to knit or crochet ever since she received a crochet hook in her Valentine's Day craft kit, but I'd been putting her off until I remembered using knitting looms in my childhood. We purchased one along with some yarn from the craft store that morning, and after a five-minute tutorial she was off!

More of the afternoon was spent on a truly vital life skill: how to clean a bathroom. I usually get the girls to help me, but this time I gave them more of the lead and merely stuck my head in and instructed when necessary. Not much was necessary actually, and they seemed very pleased to take charge of the task themselves.

Library Day
The story time theme this week was weather, and the librarian had a few fun books about rain, rainbows, and wind. The entourage was disappointed though that storytime involved more song-and-dance participation activities than it did actual stories. However, we came home with lots of good books for us:
The Story of Growl
Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?
Princess Furball
Five Little Monkeys Go Shopping
King of the Cats
The Princess and the Pea
A Tooth Fairy's Tale
Daisy 1, 2, 3

Since I was planning to start our new history unit next week, we also looked specifically for books about ancient Greece. We got a confused look from the children's librarian when I inquired about this subject while trailing a couple of kindergarteners and a preschooler, but she was willing to run with it and told me she'd keep an eye out for additional age-appropriate resources. She did help us find several things:
Ancient Greece (30-minute DVD for elementary students)
Ancient Greece Revealed (neat book for seeing into things like warships, houses, and the Trojan horse using partially transparent pages)
The One-eyed Giant and Other Monsters of Ancient Greece (picture book encyclopedia)
The Trojan Horse (picture book version)
The Hero and the Minotaur (picture book that also includes the story of Icarus)

New History Unit: Ancient Greece!
Despite the fact that we still have a few chapters of Little House on the Prairie left and I really wasn't planning to open this up until next week, I bowed to popular demand and agreed to kick off our study of Ancient Greece on Friday. The girls have seen me prepping and they simply couldn't stand the suspense anymore (Why follow-up the pioneers with Ancient Greece? Because Daddy and I let the girls watch Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief with us recently, and they're currently fascinated by the stories of Greek mythology.) I started the day by agreeing to read The Hero and the Minotaur after breakfast. Later we pulled out the poster that came with our Eye Witness book about Ancient Greece and gave the girls an overview of when and where along with tidbits about food, clothing, houses, theater, pottery, and the Olympic games (all topics we'll cover in more detail later). To top it off, I served up a finger-food lunch of things the Greeks would have eaten too: cucumbers, carrots, raisins, dates, figs, olives, cheese, sardines, nuts, pita bread, and baklava. I've been informed that we need to eat like Greeks more often.

The Three Rs
For Monkey and Bug's math this week, I introduced fractions. We went over the basics using halves and quarters, illustrated by a set of fraction bars and construction paper cutouts (then the real life application involved in baking those brownies on Tuesday). I've also seen both girls playing a fractions game on Starfall, and they seem to have a pretty good grasp of the topic. Of course, they also commandeered the paper cutouts and had lots of fun creating abstract designs with them. We continued practicing telling time, which went well with fractions since we discussed quarter past, half past, and quarter til. Both girls also reviewed their addition skills, and Bug practiced skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s.


On the left, we did lessons outside some this week; I drew a clock face and a digital time and had them
draw the hands on the clock, then I wrote a numeric faction and had them color in appropriately.
On the right, Monkey and Bug created designs with the fraction cut outs.

Both girls got into the stack of Uncle N's easy readers this week, and I added a new activity that's somewhere between reading and writing that the girls call "making up their own reading lesson": In addition to the rhyming words they sorted last week, I printed and cut out a set of sight words and other commonly used words, which I spread out in the living room. Then I had them compose sentences using the words. This activity also involved their first ever grammar lesson, which Bug in particular really liked. When she was stumped with where to even begin, I explained that every sentence needs a noun (person, place, or thing) and a verb (being or doing) along with any other words you need to explain whatever you're trying to say. She excitedly sorted out the whole lot into three piles and methodically composed sentences by picking out one word from each of the first two piles and whatever else she needed from the third. Although I explained nouns and verbs to Monkey as well, she was content to go about the assignment more organically--picking out a few words that caught her eye and exchanging them for different ones until she came up with sentences that made sense. As a result of this activity I also now have a list of words the girls have requested I print up for their use next time.

Bug sorts words and composes sentences.

Monkey and Bug have also expressed distinct preferences for how they want to practice writing. Bug has really enjoyed completing fill-in-the-blank nursery rhymes and a set of Bible quizzing practice questions. Monkey is much more interested in writing about personal experiences or books we're reading using writing pages that are half lined and half blank, so there's also room to illustrate her composition. Both girls also did an "information hunt" (which I think Monkey was only really interested in because I let her help me come up with the questions). We came up with a page of questions about animals for the girls to answer, some of which they just knew and some I helped them look up the answers in our animal encyclopedia. (So far, I've managed to work Bible knowledge, history, literature, and science into our "writing" lessons.)

Goose this week has focused on the letter G using some worksheets and a brainstorming page of things that start with G. She's also done worksheets about matching patterns and pencil control. Then of course, she's usually listening in on whatever her sisters are doing.

Growing Their Faith
I think Monkey and Bug recently reached some point of epiphany in their young faith. Prayer and reading Bible stories has long been a part of our daily routine, and we've made sure the girls know that they're true stories--different from fairy tales or your run-of-the-mill picture books. But I think Monkey and Bug realized that these stories are not only true, they're important! I already mentioned Bug's request to practice Bible quizzing, and this week their curiosity about our usual Bible readings really jumped. They've discovered that there's more to the Bible than a Bible storybook--there are different sections and lots of details the storybook versions don't include. For example, one day this week their Little Kid's Bible included an excerpt about "the bad kings of Israel," but it left them hanging on whether the last king mentioned was a good king or a bad king. They had me get out the real Bible, and we spent the next 15 minutes or so reading through generation after generation of the kings of Israel and Judah and finding out which kings worshipped idols and which ones "did what was right in the eyes of the Lord." (It was one of those "this is why I love homeschooling moments": I didn't have to rush them out the door to school; we could just sit on the couch and read the Bible!) The other day I even heard Bug lead them in doing Bible drills. They don't know the books of the Bible yet, but she was racing her sisters to find the Old Testament, New Testament, the section with the prophets, chapter 27 (it didn't matter which book, just any chapter 27 would do apparently), etc. So many times this week I've overheard them spontaneously burst into praise songs--either snippets of songs they remember from church or tunes they make up themselves. Despite my own parenting uncertainties and the occasional really stressful days, this is what tells me Daddy and I are doing something right!

Three Rs
After such an exciting weekend in San Francisco the girls were pretty excited about having some real stay-at-home days at the beginning of this week. They also rediscovered Starfall.com this week and really mastered using a mouse with a desktop instead of the touchpad on one of the netbooks. They were particularly excited about all the math games they could actually really do instead of just randomly guessing their way through them. They've really learned a ton since the last time they got into this site! (Particularly ego-boosting for me is that they mostly gravitated to the activities labeled for 1st graders!) While not "Three R" related, the site also has quite a music selection, and Monkey decided to play DJ and instigated a little dance party for her sisters with a combination of preschool songs and classical music.

For reading, Monkey is back into the reading textbook this week and doing very well. Bug finally pulled through and finished Are You My Mother? At some point she complained about reading lessons being boring, so we brainstormed a bit and came up with some ways to make it more interested. Bug actually remembered the little paper easy readers Uncle N passed down to them, and we decided it might be more motivated for her to read things she could get through in only one or two sittings. I also made a rhyming activity for both of them to work on together that was pretty popular. I typed up and cut out a bunch of rhyming words, scattered them on the living room floor, then asked the girls to sort out the words that rhyme and read them to me.

Goose learned the letter F this week, and her big sisters really jumped in together on that activity too. I introduced it by writing a big F on the white board and asking all three girls to brainstorm things that start with F and I would draw them. They came up with a ton! And Bug even copied them onto a piece of construction paper when Monkey erased the board to create her own art.

 

Goose is still enthusiastically completing counting worksheets for her math lessons (This is something Goose requests, not something I'm making her sit down and do. To be honest, I can't print them up fast enough for her most days!) For the big girls I changed up how we do math lessons a bit (they still do them separately, though). Instead of choosing one math topic and just focusing on that for the lesson that day, I've been choosing two or three topics for each girls and finding really quick activities for each them. They seem to really like the new method and are just soaking it up. They've both been practicing telling time--focusing on o'clocks and half-pasts at this point. I had them both practice making tens ("If I have X, how many more do I need to make 10?"). It turns out Bug already has these all memorized, but Monkey still counts most of them out on the number line. Monkey continues to practice number recognition for teens and tens, did some greater/less than problems, and practiced simple addition. Bug continues working on adding multi-digit number including carries, practiced skip counting by 2, 5, and 10, and worked on multiplication problems for those numbers as well.



For their writing assignments with week, Monkey and Bug wrote/dictated about our trip to San Francisco and books we're reading. Monkey was really into this and did two about Little House on the Prairie with lovely artwork to with them. Bug is more of a perfectionist, who gets stymied when the letters don't work out quite the way she wants them to (for example, they end up backwards or don't fit on the line properly). She decided to practice a few particularly problem letters to work on the first problem, and was (eventually) willing to work with me to come up with creative solutions for the latter.

History
The girls are still loving reading Little House on the Prairie. This week we talked about things like the pioneers having to make their own furniture and not being able to just run to the store for something (Pa went to the store and had to be gone for four days). The Ingalls survived malaria with the help of their neighbors and had several good and bad interactions with the local Native Americans. This week we also indulged in one of the prairie living staples--cornbread with molasses. Very popular! The girls also pulled out our A to Z in the Alamo book this week, and I pointed out that while this happened before Laura was born, it was roughly the same time period of American settlement of the West.

Library Day
This week's storytime theme was books and the library, and the librarian found some really cute ones to share. Although Monkey and Bug still don't participate in the sing-alongs, they do at least now stand up for the opening and closing songs that are the same every week. This week they also decided that the usual crowd wasn't too many kids afterall, and they actually wanted to stay and play a bit. We came home with these books:
Rhinos Play Soccer
Let's Make Rabbits
Ten Puppies
The Lollipop Caper
Elephants Never Forget
Anansi and the Talking Melons
Magic in the Mist
Can I Keep Him?

Church Workday
This Saturday was a church workday with lots of indoors and outdoors cleaning and maintenance to get done. Fortunately, this was a kid-friendly event, and our girls plus their best friend K3 jumped right in to scrub floor boards, doorways, tables, chairs, and glass doors as high as they could reach with diluted vinegar. Bug also contributed by helping Daddy run cables through a tight space in the sanctuary. After all that we ran out of jobs for little ones, and they spent the rest of the time running around the church campus with the other kids, picking flowers, finding pretty rocks and cool bugs, and finishing up the morning with a picnic lunch provided by some of the other ladies.

We also met up with a big group of other homeschoolers at the
playground this week. The girls made a few new friends, and
had fun building mountains in the wood chips.

San Francisco!
We decided to take advantage of our west coast location and Daddy's 3-day weekend schedule to make a trip to a city none of us have visited before. We managed to pack in a lot of fun!

Driving around town: We spent some time just driving around and taking in the city--steep hills (so exciting for the 5 and under set!), cable cars and trolleys, fancy houses, murals (especially in Haight-Ashbury), and of course, the Golden Gate Bridge. Sadly, it was a drizzly foggy weekend, so we didn't get a single good photo op of the bridge. However, it was pretty cool to drive over it and see the bridge towers just disappear into the clouds.

Exploratorium: This was an awesome, if rather crowded, science museum with hands on exhibits about magnets, electricity, light and colors, sound, weather, optical illusions, plants, cell biology, seashells--really the list is practically endless, and we had a blast dashing from one station to the next.

At left: Monkey and Goose play with magnets and a tube filled with water and iron filings.
At top: The entourage works with a little boy to turn the floating beach ball exhibit into a cannon.
(they discovered that if you tip the air stream at just the right angle it sends the ball shooting across the room)
At bottom: They loved dancing with the multi-colored shadows!

Marine's Memorial Club: This was actually the hotel we stayed in, but it proved an attraction all by itself. Both the lobby and the hotel library feature display cases full of military memorabilia--uniforms from different eras, model planes and tanks, MacArthur's corn cob pipe, etc.

Alcatraz: The girls were pretty excited about just getting to this destination since the journey involved a boat ride across the bay. We watched a short film about the island's history--it went from being a military post guarding the bay to a federal prison, then was briefly occupied by Native Americans after the prison closed. We toured the cellhouse and surrounding buildings and learned about both the prisoners and the families who lived on the island (Did you know about 60 guards brought their families with them to live on the island? The 75 kids or so took the ferry across the bay everyday to go to school.)

Left: Everybody enjoyed the boat ride to Alcatraz.
Right: Once on the island Bug studies a furnished cell.

Pier 39: Around lunchtime on Saturday, we strolled around Pier 39--lots of fun little shops and a few street performers--and stopped at one of the seafood restaurants along the pier for clam chowder and calamari.

standing under the Dragon Gate
 

Chinatown: This was probably the girls favorite destination (in fact, Monkey told me we should move to San Francisco someday, so we can go to Chinatown all the time). The girls loved poking around in all the shops full of trinkets, and Monkey and Bug each purchased an ornate little box for keeping their baby teeth in. (Bug has a marginally loose tooth, and informed me months ago that when her teeth fell out she wanted to keep them in a fancy box. We realized Chinatown was probably the ideal place to find that.) We stopped in at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory--a bit hard to find, but totally worth the search! We got to watch them filling and folding fortune cookies, grab a handful of still warm, broken ones they gave out as samples, and decided to buy a couple of bags to take with us. Yum! Of course, we had to eat dinner in Chinatown too. The highlight at dinner was probably the tanks full of live fish, crabs, and lobster. Our girls definitely have a healthy sense of where their food comes from: when I explained that the animals weren't here as pets but as future dinners, Bug leaned forward to get on eye level with a fish, pointed a finger, and grinned, "You are tasty!"

Computer History Museum: We made a detour to San Jose
to visit this fascinating museum near Google's campus. We arrived just in time to see a demonstration of the world's only working Babbage Difference Engine (a mechanical computer designed during the Victorian era). Monkey and Bug were fascinated and as expected had tons of questions: "It doesn't have a screen. How do you see what you're doing?" "How do you tell it what to do?" "What's that part do?" etc. From there we toured the main exhibit that covered 2000 years of computing history (from abacuses to Watson). Daddy helped the girls grasp the progress being made by comparing sizes throughout the exhibit; for example, vacuum tubes the size of the girls' stacked fists shrank to transistors the size of their pinkies, etc. They really enjoyed a wall display with a bunch of robots and descriptions of what they could do; then at the end we visited the gift shop and they got to play with robot bugs! There were some funny moments too--like when we had to explain to the girls that phones used to be connected to a wall with a wire and they were only for talking. This was practically incomprehensible to our little techies.

Left: Monkey and Bug with the Babbage Difference Engine (Please note: they only look unhappy because I asked them to pause their study of the machine to take a picture. I did not make this mistake again.) Center: Doesn't everyone teach their kindergartners about logic gates? Right: The girls got to climb inside a GoogleMaps car (Goose is in there too).

Library Day

(Nothing to do with the library,
just too cute) Goose decided
to play milliner this week
and designed these hats for
herself and Monkey.

This week's story time theme was dinosaurs! The crowd was pretty excited! The librarian even brought along her T-rex puppet to join in the fun. There really was quite a crowd this week, so the girls didn't want to hang around long. We picked out some great books before we left though:
Angelina Ballerina
Spot Goes to a Party
The Girl on the High Diving Horse
Nora's Stars
Traction Man is Here!
I Have a Little Problem, said the Bear
Dust Devil (a pioneer era tall tale)
Frank was a Monster who Wanted to Dance
Boris and the Snoozebox
Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
Can You Do This, Old Badger?

Three Rs
Goose just did a weeklong review session of the letters we've covered so far: A, B, C, D, and E. She did some coloring sheets and played a couple of matching games--matching letters to appropriate objects and matching upper and lower case letters. She also did a number of counting worksheets and several worksheets that practice pencil control. Her sisters have even been noticing her improvement in coloring inside the lines (I think I overheard Bug giving her lessons in technique at some point).

Monkey finished Ten Apples up on Top! this week. She was quite excited about conquering another book. For math this week, she joined Bug for a lesson on place value, and she reviewed the numbers 10-19 (knowing them out of order, and understanding that each number is 10 plus however many) and she worked on counting by 10s (being able to identify them out of order and understanding that each number is however many 10s). Once she had a working understanding of those concepts, I introduced greater than/less than problems, which she completely beautifully. And of course, we also practiced some simple addition (sums less than 10). For writing she practiced her whole name, did a little copywork, and completed a research project (more on that in a bit).

Bug continued reading Are You My Mother? The number of pages she read per day slowed to my acceptable minimum, but she's continued reading almost all the words the fast way. I also overheard her reading books to Goose this weekend (reading by herself for fun! Hooray!) For math, we formally reviewed place value (she was getting flustered with her addition problems, so we took a deep breath and a small step back, and pulled Monkey in for the lesson too). The review definitely helped solidify her ability to do double digit addition, and I even gave her the opportunity to add a couple of 7-digit numbers together (it didn't involve any carries). Conquering such a HUGE problem was quite the confidence booster! I also covered the concept of carrying the 1, which proved to be rather enlightening for her since one of the things throwing her off was that she had to add the ones place first when we do everything else from left to right--it just seemed backwards! Once I explained why we have to do that, it became much easier for her to remember. She also did a bunch of greater than/less than problems ("Those are easy-peasy!" she says).

I used bundled toothpicks and loose toothpicks to help illustrate
tens and ones, when we discussed place value. After the math
lesson though, the girls commandeered them for more creative play.
Here, Monkey experimented with some geometric designs.

Bug used the toothpicks to "draw" the Ingalls' house from our
history lessons. It even included the chimney and the well. The
colorful structure off to the side is her Lego version of their house.

Research
This week I introduced the idea of doing a research project. We talked about what "research" means: choosing a topic and finding out more about it. Then I had them brainstorm ways they could do that: look it up in one of our books, find books at the library, look it up on the Internet, and study it in real life at a zoo, aquarium, or museum. Then we talked about the next step--putting what they found in a format they could show to other people. For a quick and easy first project, I had them each choose an animal and decided we'd limit our researching to looking it up in our animal encyclopedia (so of course, we talked about what an encyclopedia is and how one would find a topic in it). Here are the finished projects:

Monkey's is on top, and Bug's is on the bottom.
(They just dictated the actual report.)

 

Miss Independence
Some social/emotional switch must have flipped in Monkey and Bug's brains recently, because they both made some major progress in confidence and independence in the past week: Last Sunday they joined Daddy and I at the front of the church when we officially joined and they willingly shook hands and introduced themselves in the reception line. On Wednesday, they actually jumped in for the song and dance part of the kids program at church! (It helped considerably that I finally managed to get us there a few minutes early, so it was relatively quiet and uncrowded when they arrived.) On Thursday, they excitedly told me that they finally had a chance to make friends with another little girl in their jujitsu class--they even found out her name and had a chance to play some kind of racing game (I think that's probably the first time they've managed introductions without adult guidance!). During our trip this weekend (I'll do a post on that later), they appropriately responded to strangers on the elevator, interacted with wait staff on several occasions (they ordered their own food and even said "No, thank you," "Yes, sir," etc. as called for). On several occasions at a museum and a playground, they even played cheerfully with kids they'd never met before. Considering that several years ago they would routinely burst into tears when spoken to by an unfamiliar person, this is pretty amazing, and I am so excited for them!

Goose's most recent step to being a big girl is that we've ditched the paci entirely. For a long time she's only used it for naps and nighttime, but this weekend we accidently left town without one (I swear it really was unintentional.). She did amazingly well without it (only one meltdown at bedtime), so we decided to stick with no paci when we got home. No diapers and no pacifiers! It's the beginning of a whole new era for entourage!

 

 

California Sunshine!
The sunshine was back this week, and we really took advantage of it! We actually got out to the beach twice this week (perks of discovering beach 

I also helped the girls master the art of making towers with
wet sand and empty cups. Bug was extremely proud of her
little building with a feather in the top for a flag.

access with free parking only a 5-minute drive away). The girls had a blast of course, but here's the educational side of things: examining kelp in various stages of drying out, getting up close and personal with mole crab skeletons, identifying various coastal birds and trying to guess which lone feathers belong to which kind, noting the different properties of wet versus dry sand, and checking out the effect tumbling around in the surf has on sticks, stones, and glass. (This, dear readers, is why I've yet to bother spending money on a science curriculum.) The real fun for me was watching how characteristically different the girls played when given complete freedom: Goose immediately and industriously buried herself up to her waist in sand (then leapt out of it before I could snap a photo), Monkey found a piece of driftwood and experimented with creating large designs in the sand, and Bug planned and executed a major project--recruiting and instructing her sisters in digging a boat-shaped hole big enough for all of them to sit in at once.





A sampling of Monkey's lessons outside

At some point I looked up
from my work in the kitchen
to see Monkey on the porch
rail contemplating how to
get up on the roof. She
decided their wasn't a feasible
route and clambered down
eventually.

We enjoyed the fresh air by doing some of our lessons
outside too--sitting on the bench on the front porch for reading lessons and covering the front sidewalk with math and writing lessons. Whichever girls weren't actively doing lessons were riding their scooters around. Eventually lessons ended and they migrated to backyard to enjoy several more hours of daylight.

The girls and I also finally found a homeschool playgroup! It turns out our pastor's family is part of a group that meets at a local playground, and his wife Miss K invited us to join them this week. The girls were really excited about getting to play with their friend K3 (K2 and K1, her big sisters, were involved in an organized gym class at the time). They decided the biggest climbing structure was a volcano, and they made it their mission to "rescue all the people" (just pretend people, they clarified for me) by escorting them all down the "emergency slides."

Library Day
The storytime theme was sounds this week, and the librarian had a really fun selection of books picked out. Of course, she also had a fun selection of participation-requested songs and games, which my girls chose not to do. I've been trying to at least get Goose--usually my extrovert--to jump in, but no luck yet. We found lots of good books to take home though!
The Butterflies' Promise
Dewey: There's a Cat in the Library
Abuelos
Moo in the Morning
Mrs. Spitzer's Garden
Alphabet Explosion! Search and Find
Rhinos who Rescue
Uno, Dos, Tres = One, Two, Three
Joshua James Likes Trucks
Loving

The Three Rs
This week Goose learned the letter E and continued practicing counting. Bug even took it on her own initiative to help Goose practice writing letters with very nice results. Monkey and Bug also made up some games to help her review colors.

Monkey continued reading Ten Apples up on Top for reading, and now that she's got her numbers down (at least through 20), we went back and practiced addition again. She was pretty excited about how much easier those problems are now! She's also successfully using the number line to help her solve problems. She and Bug continued copying Bible verses from their envelopes of hearts for writing.

A sample of their writing lessons this week (Bug's on the left; Monkey's on the right)
I feel I should note here that Monkey's work wasn't sloppily executed. She likes
experimenting with letter forms (making them wobbly, tall, etc.) and creatively arranging
the lines of text. At some point we'll have to work on useful legibility, but not yet.

Bug finally finished the Little Bear collection of stories just in time to return it to the library, and she read the first 20 pages of Are You My Mother? She is finally piecing together how much all the hard work is paying off when she suddenly realized how much she was reading "the fast way" now! For math this week, she really solidified her addition skills--adding multi-digit numbers and adding three numbers together. She also struggled through the process of learning to work on her own--actually completing nine problems of increasing difficulty then having me check her work rather than having me at her elbow for the whole process. By the end of the week, she was actually excited about the challenge and wanted to try figuring out on her own the ones she got wrong before I walked her through them.

Little Ninjas
Monkey and Bug definitely consider themselves ninjas-in-training, and they're working hard for their jujitsu class. Daddy helped them come up with a plan to work on their front and back rolls--the skill they're most struggling with right now. They've actually remembered on their own to do 10 front rolls and 10 back rolls every day. They take turns, watching each other work through them and offering tips. Bug even came up with the idea to keep track of how many they do with the abacus, so they don't have to try remembering what number they're on.

History
We're still studying the pioneers. We looked through the Discovery Kids magazine some more and spent lots of time looking through the spreads about what they did for fun--especially when lots of families could get together. In our Little House on the Prairie readings, we learned about digging wells and got to see the Ingalls' reaction to their first (fortunately, peaceful) encounter with Native Americans (who we studied not too long ago). While the Ingalls are settling into their new home, my girls are still taken with the idea of the covered wagons, which keep appearing in their pretend play.

 

Art Museum!
I took my little entourage to check out the local art museum this week. Monkey in particular was very excited; she's declared that someday her artwork is going to be in a museum too. The museum features a permanent exhibit of local paintings and several permanent sculptures outside. The current temporary exhibits included one of huge local landscapes (the girls got a thrill out of recognizing familiar turf), one of hand-colored photography from 1880s Japan (the girls were fascinated by both the samurai and the fancy kimonos), and an exhibit of black-and-white photography (mostly landscapes). We talked about what we saw in the art and what we particularly liked. The girls behaved beautifully, and we got lots of smiles from other patrons (let's be honest, you don't see a lot of preschoolers patronizing the visual fine arts!). The girls wanted to bring their cameras, and we got permission from a staff member to take photos as long as we didn't use a flash. Bug went a bit snap happy, and she was really excited to show Daddy what we'd seen at the museum that day (every single work of art).

After the art museum, we went across the street to explore Friendship Plaza,
a fun little garden with bricked paths and this fountain.

Library Day
Of course this week's theme was Valentine's Day. A new librarian was leading storytime this week, and she brought a couple of "friends" (puppets) with her that the girls got a real kick out of. We came home with these books this week:
Mommy's Little Monster
Hello, Day!
Seven Stars, More!
Something Special
The Night Before Christmas
Elephants Cannot Dance!
George and Martha Back in Town
King Arthur's Very Great Grandson
The Biggest House in the World
On My Way to the Bath
A Summery Saturday Morning
One of the books from last week, Tell Me My Story, Mommy, was about a mom telling her little girl the story of when she was pregnant and the little girl's birth. This, of course, generated lots of discussion with Monkey and Bug and requests to hear their story. I was quite proud of myself actually--I managed to turn what was probably the most physically miserable time of my life into a great little story that got lots of giggles and requests for retellings ("We waited . . . and waited . . . and waited, but [Monkey] STILL didn't want to come out! Finally the doctor had to make her come out. . . . You girls were so used to being together that they had to put you into the same tiny bassinette, so you could sleep with your noses this close together.")

Valentine's Day
The girls and I did absolutely nothing to formally acknowledge Valentine's Day. This has much more to do with my own laziness than it does with ideology. They absolutely loved getting their packages from the grandparents, though! The contemporary celebration of Valentine's Day (love & chocolate) is all over the place, but my curious little bunch wasn't satisfied with that: Why do we do Valentine's Day? What does Valentine mean anyway? I briefly explained the story of St. Valentine. Response: So, a pastor was killed because he thought marriage was important and now we eat candy? Um, yeah . . . that does seem strange, doesn't it?

One of the girls' Valentine's Day packages included little craft kits.
Monkey already put her to use to create this little abstract sculpture.

Grocery Store Fun
The girls made a fun game out of the grocery store this week: for every aisle they chose a different animal to imitate. I think my favorite was the jelly fish--watching three giggly little girls "wibble wobble" down the baking aisle was absolutely hilarious.

Also, I seem to be raising real foodies. Thanks to a cheese and cracker platter we put out when we had friends over for dinner a little while back, the girls requested "fancy cheese" for their grocery shopping treat. Mmmm . . . gouda. Bug's personal favorite, though, she informed me, is Havarti. I guess we'll have to look for that next time.

Three Rs
For reading, Monkey worked through a couple of stories and word lists in her text book. I think she really appreciated being back to having phonics clues, and it gave her enough confidence that by the end of the week she said the textbook was boring and asked if we could do a real book. She conquered the first half a dozen pages of Ten Apples Up on Top on Friday. Monkey has finally mastered numbers 1-13! She did worksheets, flashcards, marshmallow math, and the push up game to accomplish this.

For her reading, Bug has continued reading Little Bear stories, and her fluency is definitely improving. For math Bug did some marshmallow math with multiplication at the beginning of the week. Later in the week she asked if we could go back to adding. I think she was hoping for super-easy, but I introduced some new concepts instead: adding two digit numbers (e.g., 10 + 12) by first adding the ones then the tens and adding three numbers together. She was obviously struggling with some of it, but I was so proud of her for persevering through the hard parts without melting down or giving up.

For their writing lessons this week, both big girls made use of paper hearts inscribed with Bible verses about love that their Sunday School teacher gave them. Everyday they'd each pick out a heart to copy out the verse on the white board.

Goose learned the letter D this week through collage projects, worksheets and the magnets on the fridge. She also did marshmallow math and math worksheets dealing with numbers 1-10. She's been able to count to 10 by rote for a long time, but she's actually getting much better at number recognition now.

At the end of the week, I introduced the girls to a fun counting game: hopscotch! Part of our backyard is done with square bricks that are the perfect size and pattern for hopscotch. I also made a "hop to" board for Goose that she really loved: I wrote numbers 1-9 in random order in a square grid, and she had to hop to whatever number I called out.

History Update
I don't think I wrote about it last week, but our history unit about the pioneers continues in the form of daily readings from Little House on the Prairie. The girls are huge fans! (It's the true story of a mom, dad, and three little girls moving West--of course, it's fascinating!) They're learning about living conditions back then (cooking, washing clothes, washing dishes) and things like how to build a log cabin. They were also pretty excited when they realized a local history mural at the art museum included a covered wagon. Now they want to know what our town was like before lots of people moved here. (Fortunately, I discovered a local history museum that I'm hoping will answer all their questions. I guess know where our next field trip is going to be!)

Library Day
This week's storytime theme was cars, trucks, and trains. As usual the girls loved the stories and begged out of participating in most of the get-your-wiggles-out activities--except for when the whole group became one long train and placed a fun stop-and-go game around the storytime room. I also made friends with a couple of other milspouses. Hopefully, we can herd the kids into being friends too! We came home with these books:
The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs
Mouse's First Fall
Chicky Chicky Chook Chook
Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse
Tell Me My Story, Mommy
Hurry up and Slow Down!
Will's Mammoth
The Caterpillow Fight
Good Thing You're Not an Octopus!

Epic Adventures!
Daddy and I watched the movie Epic this weekend, and decided it was must-see viewing for the girls. They LOVED it! (In fact, I've been informed that we need own it, so they can watch it again.) Bug has even figured out that she gets better answers if she saves her "why" questions for after the movie instead of peppering me with them while we watch. The real sign that this story captured their imaginations was the next day when Monkey triumphantly popped into the kitchen with an action figure in hand: "Look, Mommy! Green Lantern looks like a Leaf Man!" He and the girls' fairy dolls, who look a lot like the flower people in the movie, had lots of adventures. At the end of movie I caught the small print noting that the movie was inspired by a picture book by William Joyce. The girls and I were very excited to find it on our library's shelves! It bears very little resemblance to the movie, but it does have Leaf Men and it's a really lovely little book that I suspect I'll be reading frequently until we have to return it.

Playground
We made it to the playground several times this week, and we finally figured out the best time to go. The elementary school bus stop drops kids off right next to the playground, and we discovered a small contingent of neighborhood stay-at-home moms who hang out for a while before heading home. There are a couple of other kindergartners in the bunch. My girls didn't play with them much yet, but at least they saw me making friends with the other moms--that's usually the first step toward making real friends for them.

Being Touristy
This Saturday we decided to visit one of the must-sees in our area, and headed for the wharf. It was a bit wet and blustery, but we had a great time anyway! Between walking along the wharf and shoreline, we spotted otters, sea lions, harbor seals, and several kinds of birds, which we were able to identify using the local wildlife guide I got today. We also stopped to watch salt water taffy being made at the candy store and decided we needed to buy a bag to take home with us after a tasty seafood dinner overlooking the marina. Dinner entertainment included watching a very playful otter and several sea gulls as well as looking up squid on my phone, so the girls would know what animal they were eating.


The girls were very excited about finding this platform full of sea lions! They were particularly amused
by the one sleepingup on the rail (seriously, I would have loved to see how he got up there!).

Daddy explained a little about how sailboats work.

Three Rs
We're all plugging away at the same goals and making good progress:

Monkey finished Hop on Pop, and decided that her reading lessons would be most productive if we went back and forth between her textbook and a real book. Since I was planning to talk her into that plan anyway, I was thrilled to jump on her idea, and she finished out the week reading pages from the text book with slightly more challenging vocabulary, but lots of phonics clues. She also took some initiative with her math lessons. We focused on numbers 9, 11, and 12 this week, then took one day to review and drill these first dozen numbers (Thursdays are super-busy, so I decided to lower my stress level and not even try to do formal lessons that day.) After doing 9 on Monday, she asked if we could "do that number that looks like two 1s next?" because she assured me she knew the number ten, but had trouble remembering eleven. For writing, in addition to some copy work, Monkey really practiced writing her name. The poor kid has kind of a long one, and she really wants to be able to write it all out instead of using her nickname on things like worksheets at church.

Goose learned the letter C this week. She's also taken to pulling letter magnets at random off the fridge and asking me what they are, so I'm hoping more letters are going to just sink in. On Friday while her sisters were copying nursery rhymes (their choice), Goose took one of the nursery rhyme copy pages, and I had her circle the letters we've done in lessons so far (A, B, and C). She continues to be really into math worksheets, and usually does 2 or 3 per day (at which point we've run out of time, but not necessarily her interest). One of the things slowing her down is that she doesn't have the pencil control yet to actually write the numbers herself. I found several worksheets that help her work on that though, by having her trace lines connecting baby animals to mommies, etc.

Bug is still reading the Little Bear book (it's a collection of four stories), but we cut short some of her reading lessons because the poor girl was just coughing so much (fortunately, by the end of the week she was sounding much better). For math, she worked in her addition book, where she can solve most of the problems without using a number line or manipulatives, and practiced using manipulatives to illustrate multiplication problems (she's working with problems from the 2s, 3s, and 4s times tables).

Everybody loves marshmallow math! I gave each girl a bowlful of mini
marshmallows and a small stack of flashcards with instructions to illustrate
the concept on the card with marshmallows (1-5 for Goose, 6-12 for Monkey,
and an assortment of multiplication problems for Bug).

We're enjoying the west coast weather with chalk drawings and picnics in the backyard!

Library Day
The theme for storytime this week was the Chinese New Year and horse stories--this being the year of the horse on the Chinese calendar. The girls were very excited about the "gold" coins in fancy red envelopes they each received on their way out. The girls didn't want to stay long to play because there were so many kids, but we came home with lots of fun books:
Animal Parade
Bravo, Minski
The Voyage Turtle Rex
Weird Parents
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book? 
Ten Oni Drummers (Monkey and Bug are learning to count in Japanese for their jujitsu class, so they were pretty excited about finding this one.)
How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?
Old Turtle
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day


Picasso Potato!
We did a quick artist study about Pablo Picasso this week. It began when Monkey creatively rearranged Mr. Potato Head's face. When she gleefully revealed her work, I exclaimed, "It's a Picasso Potato!" Then of course, I had to explain why I said that. We Googled Picasso and had fun perusing his oeuvre: the "little drawings" (his line drawings), "regular paintings" (his blue period), and his "crazied up paintings" (cubism). Monkey was particularly a fan of the vibrant colors used in Picasso's cubism paintings.

Oh, Pioneers!
You can tell we're settling into the new routine--we started a history unit this week. I thought it'd be appropriate to study the westward expansion and the pioneers, since we just finished our own westward migration. We started reading through a Kids Discover magazine about the pioneers and had lots of discussions about the differences between our trip and the trips the pioneers families made a long time ago (cars & a moving truck vs. wagons, 2 weeks vs. 3-5 months, hotels & restaurants vs. camping, etc.)

Kids Club
We found our new church home! Goose is enjoying the preschool class, and making some new friends (particularly D, whose family also attends OCF with us). Monkey and Bug are involved in the Kids Club--Sunday school for kindergarten through fifth graders that's much more rigorous than the kids programs they've been in previously. They're studying the Tabernacle right now, and they came home with a list of scripture passages for us to read and discuss together. When we started adding those to our daily Bible time, I realized the girls have only used Bible storybooks, and I needed to explain how Bible references work. Monkey was particularly fascinated by the system, and spent quite a while flipping through the pages of a real Bible. Based on comments Monkey and Bug made, they're definitely paying attention in class, and their teacher Miss C is really wonderful. They're also working on memorizing Psalm 100.

The Three Rs
We had three stay-at-home days this week, so we had uninterrupted mornings for lessons (that's the new normal here--nice, but it means Thursdays are a bit crazy since library storytime, jujitsu lessons, and OCF all happen that day).

For reading, Bug finished Go, Dog, Go! and read the first Little Bear story. She only has to sound things out occasionally and her reading is getting much more fluent. For math, she's been working on addition (she has a few pages left in her workbook) and multiplication (I finally made a few times table worksheets for her). She also did some Cheerio math alongside Monkey and Goose. For writing, she joined Monkey in copying out their memory verse. We wrote it out on the easel and took turns writing a phrase at a time.

Monkey is almost done with Hop on Pop; she's been doing a great job of sounding words out and adding some sight words. Writing, as I mentioned, involved copying out the memory verse with Bug. Math continues to be a struggle. We did some Cheerio math, where I wrote digits in boxes on a piece of paper out of order and had her fill in the appropriate number of Cheerios. Then I decided to go back and focus on just one problem number per day. Going through the numbers 6-8 this week, she would repeatedly trace each digit and then write it out on her own, then she'd complete a search-and-find page for each number (lots of numbers all jumbled together on a page, she has to circle all of whatever number we're studying that day), and for a final fun reinforcement I decided to capitalize on her interest in art: I printed out a large version of number of the day on a piece of paper and asked her to turn it into artwork that would help her remember each number. She got a real kick out of this project, and they're all displayed on fridge now.

Goose's letter of the week was B. She completed a collage of letters and objects that start with B, completed a butterfly coloring sheet, and cheerfully pointed out Bs whenever she spotted them in books we were reading. Goose has also recently discovered a love for math worksheets. She's been matching up numbers to groups of objects, tracing digits, and doing dot-to-dot pictures.

All three girls have been having lots of fun with the letters and numbers on fridge this week. It's been encouraging to hear them reinforcing in play what we've been going over in lessons.

The girls are really loving having the dresser full of craft
supplies conveniently in the study (instead of in the garage)