You know what that means. It means we had a boring week LOL. Or at least a quiet week, which I'm perfectly ok with! But it doesn't lend itself to exciting blog posts.
So seriously, what DID we do this past week?
Well, we spend time at home, which is a lovely thing to do! We're in the midst of reviewing several things right now, so we took some time to focus on "school" (while it's too hot to enjoy being outside anyway, although today is pretty nice out).
Daddy told Little Bit that she can keep the one surviving kitten from the earlier litters of kittens, she promptly named the (male) kitten "Joy. And has been doing her best to love the poor little thing to death. It endures her love with amazing patience, and makes a beeline for the front door, or he's decided that under Rodney's recliner is a good hiding spot . . . which it is . . . unless he's under there sometime when Rodney puts his footrest down, not sure what that would do . . . Joy and MiniMe's cat, Moccasin aren't on great terms, I'm guessing the problem is that Joy's mother is quite territorial (I thought that was a male thing?) and has claimed the porch as her territory and chases Moccasin if he tries to be on the porch, sigh . . . So, I think Moccasin smells her on Joy and therefore keeps his distance. . .
Our history slowed down abit while we finished up listening to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is an incredibly long book! The girls seemed to enjoy it however, and we wrapped it up this week, and did a quick overview of Bleeding Kansas, now we get to dive in to John Brown . . . such a morbid part of American History, sigh . . . But definitely interesting! And the girls are excited to read about John Brown since they didn't get to learn
Little Bit is plugging right along through the alphabet, we learned about the letter L this past week, and much to her excitement, that included getting to "lick lollypops" for snack one day :) Her favorite in-car entertainment right now are Leap Frog videos, so that's fitting in nicely with this, to give her a very firm foundation in letter sounds and such. With all 3 girls, I've used the alphabet song as a "transition song" from the time they are very young toddlers, until they're old enough to not need a transition song (though some days I think I should still use it with the big girls, sigh), so right now, one time I use it for Little Bit is to let her know that it's time to stop nursing. I'll tell her "ABC and then no more nummegs" (her word for nursing, don't ASK me where she got it, I have no idea), then sing the song. One day this week, I decided to see what she did if I mixed up the song (at that age, the big girls could sing the song, but couldn't separate it out into individual letters, or start in the middle. And even at age 5-6 didn't really associate the song with the letters they were using to learn to read, I can remember MUCH later, talking about putting something in alphabetical order and it took some rewording for it to click with them that if you sing the alphabet song, that's the order of the alphabet LOL), so I sang something along the lines of "A-B-C-D-Q-R-S . . . " she picked up on it immediately, and would tell me what letter I *should* have said, then sang through on her own, then said "now you try" it was SOOO cute! And rather impressive, for a 3 year old LOL. But then, she doesn't really understand that she's only 3 LOL.
One of the fun things we ended up doing this week was to play with the alphabet bean bags her grandmothers each made for her for her birthday. We matched up letters that were the same, and put them in order and such, she was LOVING it. (she also loves to throw bean bags into a bucket, basket or Bilibo, which was what scattered them all over the floor, requiring us to put them away, and while we're putting them away, we might as well do a little sorting right?
Each week, one thing that I print out and laminate is that week's letter, in both upper & lower case, that looks like a "road" to drive matchbox cars on. She doesn't always drive her cars on it, but does seem to like having it. This week I had most of the letters we've learned so far in the bag I took to piano lesson (my challenge is always to keep Little Bit quietly entertained during MiniMe's lesson. Now Sassy is asking about having violin lessons, and the thought of keeping Little Bit quietly entertained through TWO lessons is abit daunting, but that won't happen until we get past the busyness of late summer/fall, so maybe she'll be old enough to enjoy being read to or something by then). So anyway, she found the whole pile of letter/roads in my bag and proceeded to sort them out putting upper & lower case together. She needed some help, but did pretty well. Somewhere I have a felt "train" that has upper case on the track & lower case on the cars or vice versa, guess I should find it and see what she thinks of it. . .
We started a fun new Bible Study that looks at various girls/women in history and the virtues they exhibited. The first girl we've been reading about is a medieval princess, which is whetting their appetites for world history :)
For the first time, we're putting alot of time and effort into math, more on that coming soon (with the review).
MiniMe continues to LOVE LOVE LOVE her piano lessons! It makes her easy to find, if she has free time, chances are, I'll find her at the piano, either practicing or trying her hand at composing. And encouraging her even more, in her piano passion, we're currently reviewing a fun e-book that teaches about some of the great hymn writers. Now Miss "I can do anything" thinks she should be able to sit down and play all the hymns we're learning about LOL. Her wonderful piano teacher did say she'd see if she could come up with a simplified version of one of the hymns (just the melody) and teach it to her.
We are also working on re-vamping the girls' room right now. The idea has been brewing in my mind for awhile now, but we've been too busy. I'm doing my best to encourage my little pack rats to either give away things they no longer leave, or at least pack up things they aren't using, we're having some . . . success . . . LOL. At least we're getting through stuff and getting it organized abit more. Awhile back we hung a mirror in their room so they weren't fighting over the bathroom mirror so much, and as we were straightening things up, one of them suggested that if they had a shelf under the mirror it would be a place to put hairbrush, etc. I was trying to decide if I thought I was "handy" enough to hang a shelf (probably not), but then while we were looking at back-to-school stuff it hit me that we could turn crates into a "shelf", so we got a couple crates and stacked them to make a shelf. It's working well, except Little Bit feels left out (there are 2 crates). So, since I need a couple more crates to corral homeschool books in (in a perfect world I would have enough bookshelves to have all our books on shelves, organized by topic or something, but since I don't, I'm finding it works well to keep the books specific to a certain curriculum all together in a crate(s) that can be stacked and accessed as needed) I'm going to get a couple more and either stack them 3 high (they're rectangular, I think if I stack them horizontal instead of vertical they'll fit that way), or make it a "longer" shelf and have it 2 wide . . . might do it stair-stepped and have Little Bit have her own little top shelf to put some of her stuffed animals or something on. . . So we're making progress, and hopefully once we get everything situated, they can keep it clean better . . . maybe . . . we'll see . . .
So that's been keeping us busy this week.
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