Preschool Week of 2/18

Another week. Lots of learning.

Phonics: We finished the Progressive Phonics book on long vowels, and Crumpet is pretty comfortable with this new skill now. I love that our McRuffy book seems to be going along with the same topics at the same time. It reinforces the skills and often teaches reading rules in a more thorough way than Progressive Phonics.
This week Crumpet started reading entire pages of the Progressive Phonics, even when he should have had no idea what a lot of the words were. He's learning to sound out more difficult words, and he's learning to use the context of words to decipher them. Wow. He still has no idea that he can read things other than his school reading materials, but he's starting to come running to me screaming that he can read signs or the title of my book. (Or my e-mails. Aack.) Any day now, he will realize that he can read anything and the world is totally open to him now!

Math: We are doing great counting by fives, and we started working with nickels this week. We also read a cute book: Dollars and Cents for Harriet by Betsy and Giulio Maestro. This is a great book about different sets of coins adding up to a dollar, and it works on counting by ones, fives and tens.

Science: This week, we did some McRuffy experiments building simple systems. We built a basketball hoop from some random objects. We also built some ramps and practiced starting and stopping balls along the way using various tools. At first, this freaked Crumpet out - huge tantrums. He is not a fan of coming up with his own hypothesis about something, and I think it's because he hates being wrong. When he finally realized that life would go on even if we made a mistake, he had a lot of fun with these projects.

Art: We made these corn syrup hearts based on Nicole's directions at Tired, Need Sleep. This was so much fun! Crumpet loved it!In the end, it turned into a glitter horror show, but seeing Crumpet enjoy an art project made it worth the mess!Extracurricular: We spent some time at the botanical gardens with friends. We fed the ducks and fish, and then did some geocaching. We're going to try tent camping there this weekend.

We also went to another children's play. It was called The New Sense-sational show, and it was a magic show about the five senses. It was fantastic. We took Crumpet's neighbor friend. He'd never been to a play before, and he went completely bananas, he was having so much fun.

And, this week, we bought a Kinect game system for the Xbox. That will be a whole separate post because I have some serious mixed feelings about it... But the boys love it...

Have a great week! For more preschool posts, visit Homeschool Creations.