Preschool Week of 4/9

Preparations for our move are starting to swing into high gear, so this was a pretty slow school week.

Phonics:

We played Scrabble! Crumpet found the game when I was clearing out closets, and he insisted that we play. I looked at his letters and came up with easy words to make. Then I helped him sound out the words so he could spell them. He found the correct letters and placed them on the board. This was great for phonics, letter recognition, and also counting as he replaced the tiles he used.



Science:

We borrowed The Science Book of Gravity by Neil Ardley from the library. We've only looked at the first couple of experiments, but found that they were simple and fun.
First, we dropped a ping pong ball and a ball bearing from the same height to see which would land first. Crumpet thought the lighter ball would land first, but discovered that they land at the same time.

We built a little contraption (the one in the book was much nicer looking, but hey, I worked with what I had...) and rolled balls of many different sizes and weights down it to see if they landed in different places. It turns out, they always landed in our green container.

I don't think Crumpet really learned much from these experiments. We repeated them the next day, and he still made the wrong predictions. He really enjoyed them though, and we did them over and over.

Math:

I don't have any pictures, but we played store for a little while this week. Crumpet was the store owner this time, and he put prices on his toys so that I could buy them. I was tricky, and often gave him the wrong amount of money. I made him count the coins. Then I made him add and subtract to tell me if I owed him more or less money and how much I was off by.

Crafts:

We colored Easter eggs. We had a great kit with lots of different paints, stickers, beads, stamps, etc. so we had a lot of fun, and we created some beautiful eggs!

I've decided to go ahead and start summer vacation. The moving process is really overwhelming right now, and I'm finding that coming up with school activities and finding a special time to do them is just too much right now! Moving overseas will be a huge education in itself (for all of us). I will continue to teach as we travel, and I'll post a little bit here and there if we do something interesting. We won't have daily access to a computer from May 1 to June 30, but I'll try to update you all as to where in the country we are, and what fun things we are doing on the way to Hawaii. Please stick around to see how it goes! We'll start school back up in July, I'm guessing, and I'm looking forward to working with a 4 year old and doing a year of "Pre-K"!