Preschool Week of 2/18

This week, it was almost impossible to get Crumpet to leave the Land of Pirates and join me in anything vaguely educational. Seriously, I could be standing in front of him, speaking, and I'm not sure he knew I was in the room... But we kept busy and had fun, and I think he even learned a few things!

Nature: We got snow! Crumpet had only seen snow once, and he didn't remember it. We rolled in it, threw it, and ate it! SO much fun!

Then, today, we went for a walk in the woods and saw BUDS on the trees. Crazy weather, but it looks like spring is on its way.

Math: We re-read Rabbit and Hare Divide an Apple from last week, and then we talked about liquid fractions. I brought out the measuring cups and showed Crumpet how to divide a cup of water in various equal portions.

Art: I was inspired by a book we were reading that wonders what a bird's flight would look like if you dipped its tail in paint. Then the artist drew lots of curlycues and zigzags, etc. We decided to try something similar and guessed what would happen if you dipped frogs, snakes, and dragonfly tails in paint. First we painted our guesses, and then we actually dipped toy animals in paint to see if we were close. It was a lot of fun!

The finished product (the book was prettier!):

Crumpet also made thank you cards because his grandmother and his great-grandparents sent Valentine's gifts:

Pirates: Since Crumpet was all about pirates this week, we got a couple of books at the library that described the lives of real pirates. One gave instructions for making flags, swords,etc. We tried a recipe for pirate biscuit, which they ate when they were out of fresh food. This was nasty! It was like eating a salt lick, and we decided we were glad we didn't have to eat like pirates! But the baking was fun. Crumpet loves to play with measuring cups in the flour, pouring it back and forth. This time, he made up a game pretending the cups were people, and they were trying to divide their flour equally! He's hearing me when we discuss fractions! It's a miracle! Then, when we kneaded the dough, he spent some time making holes for dungeons and castle towers out of it... It takes a long time to bake anything with Crumpet around, but it's certainly more interesting than when I do it alone!

He was a mess at the end. Imagine my poor kitchen... (Every picture face has to be a goofy one...)

Learning about Life through Literature: I have no idea what to call this section! We've given up on Before Five in a Row because it seems to be for younger kids. Maybe we'll try Five in a Row later when we start a more structured program in the summer. For now though, I found a lovely book and made a little unit study out of it. The book is Through Grandpa's Eyes by Patricia MacLachlan, and it is about a little boy's relationship with his grandfather, who is blind. The story doesn't make blindness out to be a disability, but rather shows the many ways to see the world without sight. Crumpet was fascinated, and he has spent a lot of time walking around with his eyes closed this week! We tried smelling food to find out was for lunch, and used our ears to guess what was happening in different parts of the house. One part of the book talks about setting up a food plate like a clock so a blind person knows where his food is - for example "The eggs are at 3 o'clock". I drew a clock and placed it under Crumpet's plate, and then we practiced (see below). We saw braille writing when we were in town, and we watched guide dogs online. Crumpet loved learning all of this, and I think it was a great way to introduce him to fact that everyone is different.

Have a great week!

Preschool week of 1/14

I'm sorry about what a mess this post is. I placed the pictures in a different place this time, and it has thrown the text off completely. But I'm too lazy to fix it...

After the trials at the beginning of the week, things went fairly well here. We managed to get a lot of school done, without Crumpet really knowing :).

Phonics:We worked a bit more with Progressive Phonics, but Crumpet has figured out that he only needs to know a few words for each story. When I pause for him to read his word, he just cycles through the options without even looking at the page, until he guesses the right one. We also worked on the sounds of letters some more, and he's doing great with this. Periodically throughout the day, he'll be talking and stop at a word. He'll shout "Hey, that starts with __!" He points out objects everywhere and tells me what letter they start with. We started working on sounding out some 3 letter words with fridge magnets.

We played a game where I set out a bunch of toys and told him to give me the ones that start with a specific letter. He did well with this.

Literature: We used Katy No Pocket for our Before Five in a Row unit. This is one of my favorite stories of all time, and Crumpet loves it too. It's about a kangaroo who has no pocket, so she can't carry her joey. She's goes around asking other animals how they carry their babies, and in the end, she gets a tool apron from a workman so she can carry lots of babies. We did some memory work, trying to remember all of the animals Katy meets, and also all of the tools from the tool belt.I printed pictures of many of the animals in the book, and we played a classification game, sorting the animals into groups with fur, feathers, scales, and also bugs.

I made an apron like Katy's for Crumpet to carry his animals around in. He loves this!

Science: Lots of other blogging mamas are doing units on the human body, so I decided to jump on board while the links and book recommendations were easy to find. We read a LOT of books on the subject. Our favorites were:

My Amazing Body by Rachel Wright. This has good simple explanations of the parts of the body, as well as discussion about treating your body well, and it covers the senses.

The Human Body by Scholastic. This has great plastic overlays, so you can look into the body, system by system, and slowly put the body together to form a whole. Crumpet liked this one best, as long as we flipped right past the skull page, because this looked scary.

The Usborne Flip-Flap Body Book: We own this one and Crumpet has always loved it. I thought he's be more interested in the study of the body because of it, but he really wasn't that interested. Oh well. We did do some fun little experiments:

We blew up a balloon to demonstrate the inflation and deflation of lungs. I love that he was dressed as a pirate for this, and we chased the balloon around afterward for exercise. Homeschooling rocks!

We squeezed a ball through a pair of nylons to show how intestines squeeze food through. I saw this idea here.

We read a little book about cleanliness and then we did this experiment to show how to remove germs from our hands.

I put glitter glue on Crumpet's hands and he rubbed it all over. Then we tried to wipe it off with a paper towel. That doesn't work. We tried rinsing with water, but most of the "germs" stayed put. So we used soap and water, and it washed all the germs off! Crumpet loved this and did it 3 times.

I saw this idea here.

Other: We did a few Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready projects. I hid objects in our Find and Seek bag and had him retrieve specific ones without looking but only feeling. He thought this was great fun, and then he got silly and started handing me the wrong things on purpose. We got 2 new games from the consignment store: Blues Clues, which is really cute and clever, and Chutes and Ladders which I always loved, but Crumpet can't stand it...

Socialization: We went to karate, which is getting better. Also, I've started watching a little boy once a week. I used to babysit for him, but it's been about a year since I stopped. I have missed him, and the money will be nice to help feed my curriculum habit! And practicing sharing his toys is good for Crumpet. Here they are, cooperating on putting together a puzzle.

And in other news, potty training is going great!! Every morning, there is a huge battle about underwear, but once that's over with, he uses the potty all day! We're spending a fortune on Matchbox cars, since that's his pooping reward, but it's worth it. Bribes never worked before, but for now, he's excited about new cars. Here's hoping this lasts. With Crumpet, you never know...