Preschool - Week of 3/24

This was a great week in school! At the beginning, I was feeling unmotivated, but I managed to get up enough energy to gather together a few activities and just plop them on the kitchen table, allowing Crumpet to decide what he felt like doing. It worked out well - he rejected a lot of stuff, but also found plenty to interest him.
(Note that in almost every single picture, Crumpet is wearing an eye patch on top of his head this week. This seems to be a permanent part of his wardrobe now...)


Fine Motor:
We wrote a thank you letter to the little boy that sent us the pirate ship last week. Check out this tripod grasp! He's making huge progress with this!
We played a "game" called "Drawn to Order", which I found in Games for Learning by Peggy Kaye. You start out by drawing a simple shape in the middle of the paper. Then, take turns outlining the shape until you reach the edge of the paper. It's great for fine motor coordination.

Phonics:

We played our Alphabet Bingo game A LOT this week. Apparently, it's most fun if you play while hanging upside down in a chair, periodically falling out of the chair and knocking all the pieces off of the board...

Math:
Debbie at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn wrote about her use of Unifix cubes, and I decided to get some when I was ordering next year's curriculum. They've arrived, and we love them. I ordered them from Didax. The company has many, many books to use with the cubes, as well as other math products. I went ahead and bought their book on homeschooling with unifix cubes because it was on sale for $3. It's a good little resource, full of games to play with the cubes.

So, we used the cubes to stack and to play. We arranged them in groups from the smallest number of cubes to the largest. And back again. We worked on patterns. Crumpet seems to have patterns mastered, but I was worried that it was something in my speech patterns that was giving away the answers, so this time, I made mistakes in the patterns to see if he'd notice. He did. And he loves when I get things wrong... We played a memory game where I would put out 5 cubes of different colors and then remove one when he wasn't looking to see if he knew what was missing. He had some trouble with this, so we'll keep working at it. I introduced the idea of counting by 2's but this was way beyond him so far. We also made a stack of 4 cubes and broke it into different sets to explore the number of ways one could arrive at the number 4. Then we tried it with 5. These cubes are wonderful, and there is so much more to be done with them...

We worked with the geoboard a little bit.

Nature:

Crumpet has been absolutely desperate to go out and plant seeds. We were out in the yard one afternoon, and I turned around to find him digging a hole. He just couldn't wait any longer. So we bought some seeds and some marigolds and planted them immediately! He is so pleased with himself! While we were digging, we found earthworms, so we talked about how useful worms are in the garden.

We also went for a lot of long, wonderful walks because we had some really nice days, alternating with wet nasty ones. We saw so many flowering trees, and bees, and even a snake. Very exciting stuff! Spring is sprung!

Life Skills:

Crumpet learned to fold towels this week. And, unfortunately for him, he's really good at it! So, guess who's job that is now??!!

He has also been amazing about helping me out around the house - he's cleaning up his toys, putting his dishes in the dishwasher (with help), and here, he's cleaning up glue he spilled while working on a project. I didn't have to ask him - he just hopped up and got a paper towel! I am so thrilled. Now, if only I could teach his father the same skills... shh. I didn't say that...

We hope you had an equally lovely week! We're off for some fun travels, and goodbye visits with friends this weekend, so we should have some good field trip pics next week!