Preschool Week of 2/4

So, this picture demonstrates Crumpet's attitude this week. Pretty much: "You want me to do what? No way."
It was a frustrating week, and I'm realizing that some changes will have to be made here. Like I'm going to have to stop being a marshmallow, and learn to be stricter. Sigh...

As for school work:
Reading: We started working on long vowel sounds. He is having some trouble with this, and it's making him angry.
Math: We started counting by fives. Crumpet can count by tens, and can almost make it to 100 when counting by ones. He gets bored along the way, but he's close... We've also been working with a fun book I bought at our library book sale a few weeks ago. It's from the 80's, and it's called Anno's Math Games by Mitsumasa Anno. It's full of fun brain teasers for young children, and Crumpet loves it. I had planned to buy a few similar things for next year's school work, and now I'm sure he'll be happy with them.
Science: We are working on a unit about living things, and learning about the life cycles of frogs and butterflies. He is pretty familiar with these, but there are some new words that we are talking about.
Memorization: Crumpet now knows the days of the week, and my cell phone number. Now we can go back to memorizing nursery rhymes, which is much more fun!
Motor skills: I made a button snake this week. So far, Crumpet would like to pretend it's a pet, and not work on his buttoning skills...
Art: We tried shaving cream paper marbling this week. Crumpet loved mixing the paints and pretending to make a birthday cake, but then wasn't interested in decorating the paper. I love that he has his own mind, and he's creative in his own way, etc etc, but just once I'd love to have him participate in a project as I planned it... Just once??
Anyway, the technique is simple. You layer shaving cream at the bottom of a pan. Pour some paint around the top, and swirl with the end of a paintbrush. Crumpet's is on the left, with $10 worth of paint dumped on top of the shaving cream. Mine is marbled on the right.
Then, press a piece of paper on top of the shaving cream, rubbing it all over to transfer the colors. The paper comes off the shaving cream looking beautiful:
After that, we had a bit of trouble. We scraped the paint and shaving cream off the paper, but it never looked as pretty when we were done. I don't think I had a good enough scraping tool... On the left, I tried using a paper towel, but it smeared the paint too much,and on the right, I used a piece of cardboard like many sites recommeded. Maybe a shower scraper would have worked better? Anyway, I loved this project!
Creative Writing: We have been reading a lot of Magic Tree House stories around here. They are making a huge impression on Crumpet. He always tells me stories of his own creation, and now they often have elements from MTH. He often separates his stories into chapters. This week, he started naming his chapters. "Chapter 1: Danger. Chapter 2: Can't See." It cracks me up!

Have a great week. For more preschool posts, head over to Homeschool Creations.