Ruth and School

 Ruth has really enjoyed projects recently. For a couple weeks she was in a kite building phase, then it was a learning to roller-blade phase, then a short tinkering phase and most recently she's been working on an "Under the Sea" book that she's typing and illustrating. She's also mastered multiplication for numbers zero through five and ten. The other day Will was counting how many legs are in our family and he miscounted and said there were 9 legs. Ruth was super happy to tell him that 5 x 2 is 10 because there are five people and we all have two legs. She's also been working on money and adding with money and decimals. She still reads like a champion and has blasted through several books, most recently she finished "Ella Enchanted," so we could watch the movie. She has thoroughly enjoyed going to her weekly science class so she can chat and make friends (she was ecstatic last week because another girl asked her to stay after class and play at the playground, which of course we did). She has also been showing tons of interest in cooking and baking and made several batches of cookies completely on her own. She also has been practising chopping and dicing vegetables. Ruth has also really been embracing her big sister roll, which is something I've really tried hard to work on with her (she tends to be more bossy than nurturing...wonder where that came from?). She also loves playing games and making perler bead designs to show off to her friends at church.

 Ruth had the great idea to make a teapot out of an old water gallon and a water bottle. We used the hot glue gun to make the spout...and then we just had to have a dress-up tea party! We just had a MAAAAHVELOUS time!

Claire and School

Claire is still the most dramatic and difficult of our children. But she is also the most grateful and physically loving of the kids. She enjoys being a helper and working together with anyone in the family and has become a much better picker-upper during chore time. The biggest obstacle we've been trying to overcome is her eating habits. She has been very picky and she has thrown the biggest tantrums over food. But as she gets older she has learned to power through the food she doesn't like so she can get it over with. She and I have had a lot of fun on Tuesdays (when Ruth and Will are at a class at the Explora Museum) playing with all the exhibits and spending some alone time. She hasn't shown much interest in mathematics yet, aside from playing with the manipulatives that we have. But she is proving to be as precocious as Ruth in the reading arena. She knows all the upper and lower case letters and the sounds they make. This week she has started sounding out words, essentially reading ... her first word was "kids." She has also finally mastered her colors and knows most of the shapes. Claire loves going to primary; she has the most wonderful teacher and a great little girl friend in her class. She is also still totally in love with babies of all kinds and has really started the make-believe stage where every day she is a different animal (today it was a wild hunter dog puppy from a documentary we watched).

Will and School

 William doesn't really like it when I tell him it's time to do school work. However, when I give him time to explore and work on his own he works wonderfully. He loves to create little machines with tape and rubber bands and other trinkets he finds. He has also become very creative with Legos. Will loves learning about dinosaurs and insects and has made his own books about them. He is interested in cooking and loves making and identifying patterns. He is slowly working on reading and really likes learning tricks (like the letters o and w say OW!) He really likes talking about doubles addition and skip counting by 2s, 3s and 4s. Some of his goals this year that he worked on and accomplished were to learn more about insects, read all of his of his Nora Gaydos books twice, learn how to do a flip on the trampoline and learn about place value to the hundreds.

 Lego fun!

 We learned about symmetry and he used these same pieces to create several different symmetrical arrangements. He also made all the numbers from 1 to 12 out of Legos. And then he created a brontosaurus, tyrannosaurus and together we made a triceratops and ankylosaurus.