Preschool Corner - November 19

>

This was our first week of routine schooling after several months of frequent travels. It started off pretty rocky, but by the end of the week, Crumpet and I were working fairly well together. Several times, he even asked to do more school projects!


On Day 2 of school this week, he arrived carrying several extra "students" for me to teach. You'll see that the cars participated in many of our activities, and I think that helped keep him interested. We spent a little time working on rhytms. I would clap a sequence, and Crumpet would copy it on the drum.


We worked on number recognition. First, he matched up pairs of flashcards:

and then he put the correct number of jacks in each cup:

We did some shapes review. I turned our shapes wheel into a spinner. Crumpet would spin the dial, name and find the matching shape, and then crumple up the shape and throw it in the pot. This was a modification of the 'trash toss' game at Hallelujah Harvest found here. He liked the tossing part best, and I'm sure we'll work it into other activities in the future.

We did a couple of Disney puzzles that were given to us by a friend. Crumpet has a really difficult time making sense of how to put a puzzle together - he won't do the edges first, or match designs, etc. We'll need to work on this...

I put together a "game book" like the one I saw at Tired, Need Sleep. I laminated the pages and used window markers so we could wipe off the pages and reuse them. Crumpet did well with the simple mazes and even started to use a proper tripod grasp at times.

We played a grid game like ones I saw at Tired, Need Sleep and Hallelujah Harvest. I got the grid printouts here. We rolled a die and put the appropriate number of stickers on the grid, moving from left to right. Crumpet liked playing because he rolled the die by crashing his cars into it. He won't play anymore because I won both times we played.

We printed rhyming cards from here. Crumpet practiced matching pairs of pictures that rhyme. Then, I lined up sets of 3 cards and Crumpet would drive a car over the card that didn't rhyme with the other 2. He is getting really good at rhymes.

We played a fun penny drop game I borrowed from Tired, Need Sleep. You are supposed to drop a penny from waist height and try to get one penny in each section of the egg carton. We laughed a lot because we seem to be best at bouncing all the pennies out...

Crumpet loves to make up stories. I've started writing some of them down and having him illustrate his story. This week's story was particularly odd, but I was really impressed with his picture. It included several elements of the story, and I could even recognize some of them. But then... he decided to draw a roller coaster over the whole thing and now it's a giant loopy squiggle...

I found a cheap set of magnets at Cracker Barrel and decided to start our McRuffy Kindergarten Science curriculum with magnets. We used their experiments and also a few from Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready.
First, I gathered lots of household items and we checked to see if they were attracted to our magnets. We separated magnetic objects from non-magnetic ones, counted each group and determined which of our groups had more things in it. (He wasn't thrilled about posing here.)

We made our own turkey refrigerator magnet for Thanksgiving. I found this turkey at the The Crafty Crow.

We experimented with magnetic force and how strong it can be. We used our magnets to move a paper clip through a piece of paper, a paper plate and several books. Crumpet liked making the paper clip dance on the plate best of all... We also tested the magnet through water.

We got this great little book at the library. It was simple to understand and had a few more quick experiments that we tried.

For nature study this week, we went to the preschool nature walk at our local nature center. The kids learned about turkeys. Here they are collecting "turkey food":

using feathers to study the five senses (again he's annoyed about posing!):

and making a turkey craft:

We had a great week, and I'm so happy to be home and working school back into our lives! I hope you had a good week too!