What have the kids been working on this week while I have been studying myself?

Colin has been studying Scooby Doo. A few weeks ago, the librarian gave him a Scooby Doo book to try. He loved it because Scooby talks funny. When he finished it, he put everything Scooby Doo on hold with his library card. He has been reading Scooby books, watching Scooby movies, and playing Scooby computer games this week. They are not exactly classics, but he is learning. Tonight when the kids were playing babies, they were going on a trip in boats. Colin asked Robyn what kind of boat she had. She didn't know so he suggested she be in a gondola like Scooby and Shaggy. So she and Grace were in gondolas and Colin was in a canoe.
He has also been playing with numbers a lot (thanks to Robyn's current obsession with math). Now that he "gets" place value, he can add huge numbers together. Randy gave him the problem of 123456 + 654321 and Colin thought is was great that the answer was a bunch of 7s. He spent a lot of Sunday figuring out how to write problems that would add up to a lot of the same number like 1234 + 4321 equals 5555. He even noticed that the number of numbers is one less than the number (ie 1234 +4321 = four 5s). He is very good at saying the numbers he creates too like 617528 is six hundred seventeen thousand five hundred twenty eight. Fun Stuff. He has also been playing a bit with multiplication. He likes the 11 times tables and likes to times by 10.
Legos have also been big this week. He has been building cars and pyramids. Very cool.

Robyn has been crazy about math lately. I bought her a Primer level Math U See book in December and she is almost through the whole book! She said the other day, "I just love math, Mom." I love to hear it. My visiting teachers came over and she was working on her Math U See book. One of them asked if she was doing school. Robyn just gave her a really funny look and said, "No, I'm doing math." It was pretty funny.
Robyn has also become a voracious reader. On Monday, she read to Grace for over an hour. It was awesome to watch two little girls just sit and read for that long. They like to sit with me while I read my books and they read their books.
And of course she has been playing babies. Playing babies everyday is a given.

Both girls would live outside if they could. They love to swing and do tricks on the bar of the swing set. It's been pretty windy this week, so they haven't been out as much as they would like to have been.

Grace has been doing her "math book" too. It is really an old preschool workbook that I bought at Walmart a million years ago. She wants to be a big kid so she does what the big kids do. it has been fun to watch. She learned to write several letters doing her "math."
She LOVES books. She spends hours being read to by whomever she can get to read to her and hours just looking at the books. Her favorites are her Winnie the Pooh books by AA Milne and the Magic Tree House series. (She likes to get out the whole Magic Tree House series, not just one book at a time.) They are not exactly two year old kind of books, but that is what she likes. She likes to look at the words and find letters. Today she was "reading" the Rainbow Fish and she asked me, "What does B U T spell?" I love it!
She has been spending a lot of time playing babies. She is frequently lost and she is in her room or in the hideout playing babies by herself. She likes to read to her babies and play games, like Memory, with her babies. And, of course, plays babies with Robyn a lot. Grace has more time for babies because she just little and doesn't have quite as many jobs as Robyn does.

It is so fun to watch them inspire each other.