Pedigreed Housewife World

As the kids get into harder readers, they have encountered a something new – punctuation marks beyond the period. Briana understands how to sound out the word, ouch, for example, but seems perplexed by all of the “swiggles in the air” and the “line with the dot underneath” after it. (“Ouch!”) She’s also encountered commas, question marks, and apostrophes a lot lately and is endlessly intrigued by them. The final push to focus on punctuation this week came from a letter Bree wrote. She didn’t know how to make a comma between the city and state. Most times there is a more fun way to teach than lecture style, but sometimes lectures are just the best thing. I go over to the chalkboard with the kiddies. I make lines and put a dot in the center. I ask the kids, “If this dot was at the end of the sentence, what is it called?” “A period!” Both girls know. “What does a period mean?” I ask. “It’s the end of the sentence,” they respond. Here it is almost all done. I ...

Last week the Montessori Kindergarteners (MKers) at my kids’ school did research projects on the animals of the Amazon. They all did such a fantastic job and my kids were blown away. They look up to the MKers in the class and really wanted to do a research project. I, on the other hand, told them “It’s Spring Break. Let’s relax.” And somehow we ended up making our relaxing into a research project anyway. Hey, Spring Break is all about fun your way, right?  So how did relaxing turn into research? I suggested that the girls and I lay on the deck and enjoy the fresh air. While outside, I closed my eyes. The kids were stunned. Mommy never closes her eyes (of course not – I have preschoolers! J ) I told them that I was listening to the birds chirp. They couldn’t see the birds but we could hear them.  Briana ran in to get her binoculars. Then we found a pair for Abby and started looking for those chirping birds. Bree wanted to draw her birds ...

There’s a ton to do outside as the first beautiful, soft flakes of snow fall to the ground. But what about the day after? The snow is too icy to roll into snowmen, make snow angels in, or sled on, but you still want to have snow day fun. This is the perfect time to make snow cones! Not the edible kind! Please do not eat these! Don’t eat the yellow - or purple, or green, or other colored - snow. My girls are dying to get back into the snow the day after we got enough snow to have school cancelled. The problem is that somehow it’s 50 degrees out and the snow is virtually gone. Except on our winter wonderland of a deck. The deck is covered in frozen, packed snow. So we invent a new snow day activity. Snow cones! If you do not have Do A Dot paint markers, go get some right now. It’s the best! The paint is held in tubes so the kids can dot it on without making a mess or creating mounds of cleanup with brushes and water cups, etc. We take those Do A Dot mar...

Have you guys seen the McKenna American Girls movie? My kids love it. In the movie poor McKenna fails a test and has to get a tutor or she might have to quit gymnastics. I won’t spoil the ending but there are more twists and my girls both agree that it’s a nail biter. As such, Briana has decided that she wants to take a quiz really really really really badly. She knows she won’t fail, but she just wants to find out what a quiz is like. Of course she’s taken the Kindergarten Readiness Test, but she doesn’t think that counts as a real quiz. So with school snowed out, we have the perfect opportunity to practice quiz taking. By the way, this is entirely the girls’ idea. I was hoping for the perfect day to sleep in today. So at 7am on a snow day we start our quizzes. Each girl gets her own quiz based on what she is working on. We start, by demand, with “a words and letters quiz that requires you to circle stuff like McKenna did”. I ask the girls if they are nervous abo...

Valentines Day at our house is all about construction paper. Making hearts and cards and decorations take over free time. That excitement extends well beyond when the candy is all eaten. I’m all about short cuts and time savers after the holiday, so I show the kids that if they fold their papers in half then they only have to cut out half of the heart to get a full heart. Of course they ask why - the question that rules every house with preschoolers. So I explain and we veer off into an adventure about symmetry. A heart is a symmetric shape. That means that one side is the exact same as the other side. Said another way, if you fold it in half on top of itself, the sides will match up. In the case of a heart, it is vertically symmetric. I refrain at this point to show them that it is not symmetric about a horizontal axis and I’m glad I did (we’ll get there in a second…) “Is anything else symmetric” they both want to know. Rather than telling them, I ask them to...

Flashlights fascinate my kids. Lately they have discovered the many varieties of flashlights we have around the house and they can spend hours of nighttime fun with them. One night we were all on Briana’s bed with the lights off, sending sparks of light across the room by flashing the lights on and off. I shone mine right into her mirror and showed the kids how the light was bent onto the ceiling. They were so excited. We did this every night for a week until I decided to show them some more cool light tricks. Today we will bend light, absorb light, reflect light, and shine light. Bending light I start by asking the kids if they think they can bend light? “Yes. If I put my hand on it.” Says Briana unimpressed. “Well, do you know what it is called when you bend light? It is called refraction. You know what else, water refracts light very well.” I say trying to excite her. “That means that when the light comes into a transparent surface (that you can see...