Preschool Week of 4/22/11 - Passover and Art Studies

This was a fun week filled with Field Trips and Culture studies which are our favorite parts of school. We did a little traditional school work, too.

Math: Crumpet seems to have a handle on addition so I introduced subtraction this week. No problem. We also started using the book Family Math for Young Children, which has lots of fun math games for kids. We worked on estimation this week.
Writing: I continue to try to get Crumpet to tolerate writing. I found this great book by Mead:
I've used other writing prep books by this company and we love them. This one teaches kids to use stencils to draw shapes and then shows them how to combine shapes to create pictures. Crumpet thought this was fun and he managed to draw a tree and a rocket ship before getting frustrated and tossing the book on the floor...
Cutting: This is going much better than writing. I'm drawing different shapes on scrap paper and having him cut out one shape a day. He is now able to cut mostly on the lines.

Culture/Religion: We learned about Passover this week. We read a pretty good book, The Passover Seder by Emily Sper. We tasted matzos and macaroons, neither of which was a big hit with Crumpet. (I LOVE macaroons...) We read about a boy growing up in Israel in our Children Just Like Me book. We also watched the movie The Prince of Egypt. The movie was intense, and stirred up lots of questions, but it told the story incredibly well. Crumpet's favorite part of the week's study was to pretend to be Jews escaping from Egypt. He's very into packing right now, and packed lots of bags of matzos...
Art: We read Squeaking of Art by Monica Wellington this week. This is a great book about a group of mice that go to the museum. It introduces different types of art that you might see in the museum. (Thanks Natalie for the recommendation here at Mouse Grows Mouse Learns!) Then we took a trip to the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Theatre: We went to the last production of the season at the Honolulu Theatre for Youth. It was called Where Do Things Go? and it was all about the fate of trash, water, etc. after we use it. It was so much fun, and Crumpet and I both loved it. We are eagerly awaiting the beginning of the fall season which will feature plays about Hawaiian culture.

My little man turns 5 tomorrow, so now we're gearing up for a weekend of birthday celebrations.


We hope you had a good week of learning. For more preschool posts, check out Homeschool Creations.