January: Week 3

I don't feel like Ihave a lot to post about. Here are the highlights - or what we have photos of. We missed playgroup - Joshua was invited to a friends house and he stayed there for 6 hours!! We did make it to the library but I think it's a little advanced for Abigail, although Joshua loves it. We're all done with sharks (yea!) but we're diving in B with a vengeance this week and also beginning our "new baby" theme. Nice that baby is the same in German and English - I try to get as much mileage out of those Bs as I can.  This week is going to be super busy but hopefully we are succesful and get the most fun things done! (like baking bananabread!!!)

Ok. we made Hammerhai Hute (hammerhead shark hats). Abigail tore hers minutes after the first photos, and Joshua had a meltdown - he missed his nap that day, so we had to do another photo shoot, injured Hammerhai and all, the next day.

Here is our last shark snack. For some reason I thought shark and fish fruit snacks suspended in jello would taste good. I suppose only if you like soggy fruit snacks and blue jello, which I don't.

We made "B"s out of beans (Bohnen) which was a lot of fun. And then the kids took some cups (Becher) to use while playing with their Bohnen. It is so fun, it seems like everything starts with B.

Also, here are our favorite Shark books. The three little fish and the big bad shark is just a knock off of the three little pigs (but I don't think Joshua knows that story, which may be why he loved this book so much) of course, he identified most with the Shark.  Surprising Sharks was fun because it taught about sharks and all different kinds of sharks. Did you know the Dwarf Lantern Shark is the smallest shark, only the length of a chocolate bar, and his belly lights up in the dark. Very strange. Shark in the Park is meant to help children learn how to read which for me makes it so easy to translate into German. This was Abigail's favorite book by far.  The other one just had some cool photos.

Here are our new baby books. We haven't read the Mister Rogers book yet, but the big sister and the big brother books are the current favorites. I don't know why, though, every book about getting a new baby means that the other kid automatically feels angry, left out, and unloved, and his parents have to reassure him that they still love him too. It's like they are prepping my kids to be mad at their new brother. (The big brother and big sister books shown here aren't actually like that, by the way, but most other books I find are and that is kind of annoying).

Mostly we just identified a lot of B words. We sang our fish song - a lot. And I tried to get Joshua to write out some B's but he wasn't as excited about writing B as he was about writing A - I only got about 10 total out of him the entire week. I'm not stressed about it.

My favorite part about this weeks learning was that anytime Joshua started singing "B... faengt mit B an" (B... starts with B) Abigail would get totally mad and shout out "Nein! Abigail faengt mit A an!" apparently this little girl can only handle one letter and one word at a time. :)

*another cute note. We spent Friday up at my in-laws for some good ol' R&R. Joshua kept insisting, though, that he bring a second pair of underwear up, which he did. Finally I got it out of him that he was worried he would wet his pants because he would be having too much fun and not make it to the bathroom in time. Then he wouldn't have a dry pair of undies to change into. He was just trying to be prepared (He did wet his pants a little at Christmas because really, who wants to take the time to go to the bathroom when you are busy running in circles with your cousins screaming at the top of your lungs - apparently the wet underwear was more traumatic for him than I thought.) I like that he came up with a solution though. I suppose a better solution would be to just go to the bathroom.