Preschool Week of 12/16

So first things first. Here's Crumpet breaking a board in karate!
He had another good introductory class, and will officially start classes in January. I hope he will do as well when there is a big group of kids around him... For now, he is very proud of himself, and we love seeing the confidence this has given him already.

We had a pretty productive week in school.

Math:

For number recognition, I put numbers around a chair cushion and Crumpet had to jump on the number I called out. I love this picture!

We did some M+M graphing, and talked about more and less. I found this graph here.

We practiced patterns and the idea seems to have really clicked with Crumpet. We started working on ABC ABC patterns. We used more M+Ms and also the Christmas pictures which were part of a pattern activity here.

Letters and Language:

I made a trail of lowercase letters. Crumpet would roll a die, move Lightning McQueen the appropriate number of spaces, and tell me the name of the letter.

We worked on positional words. These printouts were part of a Christmas lapbook at 1+1+1=1 here. I'd been wanting to work on this concept with Crumpet, and Carisa put these out at just the right time.
We started using the Before Five in a Row curriculum this week. I was looking forward to starting Five in a Row next year, so a friend lent me the book for younger kids. It's a unit study program based on children's literature, and so far, I really like it. We started with Goodnight Moon, which is very simple, just to get the hang of the system.

I also started some memorization work with Crumpet. We're learning a few nursery rhymes. Sometimes, he resists telling me the rhymes, but if I change out the words and add something silly, he'll correct me so I know he knows the real words!

Science:

We worked on the senses of touch and hearing.

General:

We did a clothespin toss. This got really silly...

We played a game I found in Family Fun magazine. We each collected a few random things from around the house and put them in gift bags. Then we exchanged bags. For each item, we had to say thank you and also make one positive comment about the gift, even if it was something boring like toothpaste (ours has a picture of Thomas the train on it, so Crumpet said "Oh, I love Thomas). It's supposed to teach kids to be polite when opening gifts, which is often difficult during the chaos on Christmas morning. I was really surprised at how quickly Crumpet caught on and how well he did with thinking of good things to say. He has even initiated the game since then. We'll see how he does on the Big Day!

Socialization: We went to a Birthday Party for Jesus at the church that hosts our playgroup, and the kids made these pretty ornaments.

We also went to the library story hour, and hosted a Christmas brunch for our neighbors.

We hope you had a good week too!