our homeschooling days

We are so blessed to be home together, my children and I.  We wake up, we eat big breakfasts, we sing and dance and read, we play (I cook and clean-ish), we learn letters and counting and life skills with simple invitations to learn and play, we enjoy one another.

Looking back to my word for this year : content.  I remember writing that I will be satisfied if I played with and read to each of my children, both individually, and together, each and every day.  And though I love to introduce other ‘riveting’ activities and learning time, I keep that at the back of my mind.  Read and play.  Read and play.

I have shared John’s tot school days with you, and when we began our preschool days, I wrote that I knew I’d change course somewhere in the year.  Well this is the course change.

Though I will continue to post on our preschool books for each letter, our preschool alphabet book, and our ABC felt animals, we are taking more of a relaxed, organic, child-led approach to not only our days but also how I share here.  We still work on our letter of the week, and I shared more in detail here as to the whys of continuing to intentionally introduce/re-visit each letter — paying particular attention to the sounds and how to write the uppercase letter.  But I will not be sharing our preschool according to each letter — I have already shared in our preschool circle time notebook and our recitation time schedule what we may or may not do according to each letter so there is no sense in re-hashing those boring details over and over.  But I do hope you look at some of the above posts for more details on what we are doing.

I have two very different children.  Four year old John has a wild imagination.  Every day he becomes a new animal or character — today it was an anteater and Santa and the mailman.  And two year old May loves to watch mom and imitate daily activities.  She loves her doll and playing mom and taking care of everyone and everything around her.  She is happy to sit in a chair and color, which is a welcome surprise, after accepting that John absolutely does not want to color or craft or art much of anything.  But I think we are in a nice wave — I know how to pique his interest just so that I feel confident his learning is just that.  He is learning through play and his independence and our varied work together.  Life is beautiful.

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Writing letters in salt on our trays, alongside our build-a-letter templates.  We like to scent this with just a touch of lavender essential oil to help them time be calming — that is mom-speak for at least try to keep some on the tray and not all on the floor!

Foam animal stickers on foam sheets are a great fine motor activity for little hands. John and May both love our stencils as they learn shapes and geometry concepts.  We use the Pip squeak markers. May’s new favorite activity is drawing with markers in magazines.  She loves to draw on the people’s faces.   Here is John with his notepad — a block with a cylinder block pencil.  He was writing all different kinds of notes all day long.Again working with the build-a-letter templates.  John liked these a lot this week, so we brought them out quite a bit. May was excited to work too. Here is May painting with washable paint and stamping letters on her helicopter (see our preschool schedule for info on printables). I try to set “stations” out once a week to entice both children to work with various materials.  May is often at the table coloring or painting, but this motivates John to get involved.  He was really excited about stamping with letters and farm animals this week, as well as cutting with scissors. I was so surprised that John wanted to take the time to cut out this H is for Hippo.  He was very determined and he enjoyed every second of cutting, and then gluing his masterpiece together.  (see our preschool schedule for printables.) And some shaving cream fun. May loves coloring with dry erase markers on heavy duty sheet protectors.  This tot school notebook is from 1plus1plus1equals1. Stacking Lego Duplos. Sporting matching Buzz Lightyear jetpacks.  Little sis was so happy to be just like her big brother. Counting goldfish on counting cards. Building a firehouse with blocks.Setting up garbage (buttons and stones) next to his built block houses for the garbage truck to collect on the taped road.Our work for some of the week on our clothesline in John’s room.Our charts: see our preschool circle time notebook and our recitation time schedule for more detailed information on these!!