Preschool - About Me, Week 2

Day 1: Feelings

We spent a lot of this day in front of the mirror.  First I asked him to make a face that went along with a feeling I said, like happy, scared, surprised, etc.  Then I asked him to make a face for how he felt when I said certain things, like cake, present, puppy, owie, etc.  Then I made sounds like laughing, crying, etc. and had him told me how I was feeling.

We read the book Today I Feel Silly 

and made faces in the mirror to go along with the book.  The back of the book had a face where you can turn a wheel and change he expression and we played with that for a bit.  

Then we read the book Feelings.  

This book was great for discussion and we probably spent half an hour reading this alone.

We sang the song "If You're Happy and You Know It" but with different feelings for each verse instead of always happy.  And we sang "If You Chance to Meet a Frown."

For our craft we took a paper plate and I cut eye holes out of it and let Alex draw a happy and sad face on the top and bottom.  

He's played with it a lot since then.  The eyelashes actually make it look like tears when he turns it upside down.

If we'd had time we would have taken crackers and spread peanut butter on them and then made faces out of raisins and peanuts, etc., but time ran out.

Day 2:  Five Senses

This was our best day yet!  There is so much stuff you can do for the five senses that it was hard to narrow it all down.  

First I made little cards that each had a picture of an eye, ear, nose, hand, and tongue and asked him what each was and what we use it for.

Then we read the book My Five Senses.

This book helped put the words sight to eye and hearing to ear, etc.  They were words Alex didn't quite have down for each sense.

This next part was the highlight of the day.  I got five brown lunch sacks and labeled each one with a picture of a sense.  Then in each bag I put things that he would have to guess using that sense.  In the hearing bag I put a bell, a whistle, a piece of aluminum foil to crinkle, and a small Tupperware with popcorn kernels in it to rattle.  In the taste bag I put salt, lime juice, a grape, and a chocolate chip.  In the touch bag I put a seashell, sandpaper, a piece of fake fur, and a silky ribbon.  In the smelling bag I put a bottle of perfume, a bottle of liquid smoke, some Pepto-Bismol (it's the worst smelling thing I could find), and some pine needles.  In the sight bag I had a picture of the kids with a rainbow, a magnifying glass, a small book, and a kaleidescope.  

I blindfolded him for all the senses except sight.  He wanted to do this over and over again.  Then he had to test me.  When Ella came home he tested her.  And he wanted to test Daddy but he wasn't home.  This would have gone on forever if I hadn't had to put some of the stuff away.

We sang the song "I Know Heavenly Father Loves Me," then we then read the book The Listening Walk.

And then went for a listening walk ourselves, though we turned it into a five senses walk, which after the fact we realized was too much at once.  We took a digital recorder to record the sounds we heard, we took a camera to take pictures of the things we saw, and we took a bag to collect things we could smell and feel.  I was pretty sure we wouldn't find anything to taste, but we actually found a peach that had fallen off someone's tree!

When we got back I had Alex glue everything we'd found onto a scrap piece of cardboard.

We even glued the peach pit on there.  While we were doing that Daddy was making a slide show of our pictures and sounds.  It's not great, but here it is:

(It won't load.  Sorry!)

I also had him do a worksheet I found online here about good and bad smells.  Alex loves cutting and pasting so I couldn't pass this one up.

And finally, we baked banana bread.  That took all of our senses, especially taste!

With more time we would have made sandpaper art.  You color on sandpaper with crayons and a cinnamon stick so that all the senses are being used, you see the colors, hear the sandpaper scratch, feel the sandpaper, smell and taste the cinnamon. 

Day 3:  Clothes

To start I showed Alex pictures of different pieces of clothing I had cut out from a catalog and had him tell me what they were.  Then I pulled out some real clothes of mine and Anton's and dressed him all up.  He looked super cute!  We talked about the different clothes we wear in different seasons and the different clothes we wear at different times of day.  Then we talked about specific clothes we wear on certain parts of our bodies, like hats on heads, gloves on hands, etc.  I'd name a body part and he'd tell me all the clothes he could think of.

We read the books Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed (I LOVE Mo Willems),

and The Emperor's New Clothes, and Clothes in Many Cultures.

I didn't like the version of The Emperor's New Clothes that we had (it's not the one I linked to above).  It used the word "stupid" over and over again, and that's a word that is banned in our house.  And the way the story was worded it was way over both my kids' heads.  I should have reviewed it before reading it and gotten a better version.  Oh well.  Live and learn.

After reading Clothes in Many Cultures we tried to dress up like the different people mentioned in the book.  I have a sarong and it worked for most of the stuff.  

We ended our day and our About Me week by making paper dolls then cutting clothes out of catalogs to dress them.  Here are Alex and Ella's dolls:

Ella always has to do what we did when she comes home from school.  They weren't patient enough to finish all four dolls, but they spent a lot of time searching for the perfect clothes and cutting and gluing.  We'll definitely do more of this kind of thing in upcoming weeks.

Preschool - About Me, Week 1

Day 1:  My Name and Age

We started by talking about where Alex's name came from and the different nicknames he has.  I was going to have him learn to write his name, but decided he knows how to do it well enough.  I would have used this website to print a custom name writing page.

Then we talked about famous people who have the same name as him.  I briefly talked about Alexander the Great and Alexander Graham Bell.  I was going to get books about them to read later, but completely forgot.

Then we talked about his birthday.  He gets the month he was born mixed up so we practiced a few times.  I showed him pictures from when he was a baby.

Then it was time for our activity.  I printed off a super fun growth chart from here and hung it on the wall.

Everyone got weighed and measured and we wrote our names, ages, weight and height on the chart.  Well, mommy and daddy just got their height.

We read the books A Birthday For Frances:

And I Like Myself:

And last but not least, we made homemade soft pretzels and shaped them into the letters of our names.  I used the recipe found here.  The letters didn't stay together while cooking, but the kids had fun anyways. 

Day 2:  Parts of My Body

We started off this day with a guessing game.  I described Alex and he had to guess who I was describing.  He kept guessing Ella even when I said short hair.  I had to help him out.  Then we pointed to different parts of his body and had him name them.  Then I said a part and had him point to it.

Next I got out our dry erase board and drew a picture of a person but left off one of the body parts and he had to guess what was missing.  I only got to draw two people because he took over and had me guessing what was missing on his people.  It was funny because he would forget the arms every time and so I'd guess arms and then he'd say something like it was the nose when you couldn't tell it had a face at all.

We read Inside Your Outside:

And a section from What Your Preschooler Needs to Know about bodies.

I would have also read This is Me by Richard Scarry, but the library couldn't get it in time.

Then on to the activity that was repeated for days.  We checked out a couple of fingerprint art books by Ed Emberly and I showed Alex how to make fun pictures from his fingerprints.  First we looked at them through a magnifying glass so he could see we all have different fingerprints, then we made all sorts of silly things.  

(Some of Alex's art.)

I couldn't find a good ink pad that didn't gloop up when doing fingerprints so we ended up just using washable markers.  It worked great and let us use all different colors and washed off easily.  The books were also very kid friendly in that they show each step of the drawing so they were able to do it without help.  I say "they" because Ella had to join in when she came home from school.

We were going to make gingerbread men or sugar cookie men as a treat, but the fingerprint art took the rest of the afternoon.

Day 3:  Things My Body Can Do

This was a short school day.  We started by having Alex do different motions and then talking about what part of his body he was using.  We also talked about things he can do all by himself with his body like play, brush teeth, etc.

We read the books Thank You For Me, Dancing In My Bones, 

and the story of the gingerbread man.

For an activity I was going to have him name all the things he does during the day and draw them in a timeline-like format and let him color it, but we were short on time.  Also if we'd had more time we would have made pulled taffy as a way to use our bodies, but thankfully for my waistline, we ran out of time.

And that's it for week one!

Preschool Themes

Here are the themes we are planning on studying this year.  I will link the theme to the post as we do them.

All About Me (Week 1, Week 2)
Family
Homes
Food and Harvest (Week 1, Week 2)
Fall
Birds (Week 1, Week 2)
Halloween
Safety
Dinosaurs
Thanksgiving
December Holidays (Hanukkah, Kwanzaa)
Christmas
Gifts and Decorations
Winter (Week 1, Week 2)
Transportation (Week 1, Week 2)
Water/Light/Air
Health
Fairytales
Presidents
Community Helpers (Week 1, Week 2)
Oceans
Spring
Flowers and Plants
Insects Farms
Easter
Earth Day
Habitats
Cinco de Mayo
Mother's Day
Zoo and Wild Animals
Earth
Solar System/Space

There are a couple odd days here and there because of holidays and such and we will cover a specific artist and their style on those days.  We are also breaking at all the school holidays except spring break since that is the week before Easter and that's when I wanted to cover Easter.  I have the themes coordinated to the seasons and holidays, so that we're talking about light and shadows on Groundhog's Day, for example.  We'll see how this goes!

Home Preschool

So because I'm cheap and because I hope we move sometime during this next school year, I decided to home preschool Alex.  I wanted to homeschool Ella too, but she threw a royal fit any time I mentioned it, and besides, she loves school far too much.  I figure they can't mess her up too much in first grade, so off to school she went.

But since I was spending so much time planning what I was going to do for school for Alex, I figured I'd post about it here for anyone who cares to make use of it.  We've already done two weeks, so I'll catch up on those without pictures, since I didn't bother to take any, and then have more in depth posts from here on out.

I've been using a few different resources for planning my school days.  I started out with the book Teach Me Mommy.  I found it at the library and of all the different theme plans I could find I liked the ones in this book the best.  However, I don't love all of them, so I scratched some and added others.  The other thing about this book that's not great is all the books suggested for reading are out of date and not readily available.

To add depth to my themes I've been using the Core Knowledge What Your Preschooler Needs to Know.  Any subjects that weren't covered through the themes that were in this book I added in myself.

I've also gotten ideas from the website Everything Preschool and the fabulous site Lesson Pathways and of course Starfall for reading.

Our science activities are going to come from the book The Best of the Mailbox Science for Preschool and Kindergarten.  The themes covered in this book almost perfectly match the ones in Teach Me Mommy.  It was a great find that wasn't too dumbed down like some kid science books I looked at.

We will be doing piano lessons from 67 Fun Songs Primer.

I get all our reading books from the library, but use Amazon to check the reviews and see which books on which topics are the best.

We're going to do school three times a week, usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  I try to remember to start all our days with a calendar song and weather song, but I don't always remember.  We usually have a discussion of the topic, a song or rhyme, at least two books to read on the topic, an activity, and then a craft or cooking activity.  I don't always go in the same order.  It depends on what the subject is and what we're doing.  I usually have far more planned than we get through on some days, and others we're done in 15 minutes and I'm wondering why it went so fast.

On Tuesday and Thursday and any other day he wants, he does workbook pages from a set of workbooks I ordered here.  They cover cutting and pasting, coloring, numbers, letters, math concepts like before, after, between, animals, habitats, etc.  He does 4-5 or more pages almost every day and loves it.  The beginning book was a bit below his level, but once we got into writing numbers we were right on track.

I've also ordered a Saxon Math course, but it hasn't come yet.  If I like it, it will be included on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And that's it.  It's all a work in progress, but hopefully someone gets some ideas from this.

Enjoy!

Blog Post for Survivalist Blog Contest

M.D. Creekmore over at the The Survivalist Blog – a survival blogdedicated to helping others prepare for and survive disaster – with articles on bug out bag contents, survival knife choices and a wealth of other survival information is giving away a Go Berkey Water Filter System (a $139.00 value)! To enter, you just have to post about it on your blog. This is my entry. Visit The Survivalist Blog for the details.

WANTED: Fun penpal to play the Letter Game with me!

I just finished reading the book Sorcery & Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot.  It was written by two ladies who played the Letter Game and decided to publish it into a book.  And what is the Letter Game?   This is what it says on Wikipedia:


"A letter game involves the exchange of written letters, or e-mails, between two or more participants. The first player writes a letter in the voice of a newly created character; in this first letter, the writer should establish her own identity and that of her correspondent, should set the scene, and should explain why she and her correspondent must communicate in written fashion. In subsequent letters, plot and character can be developed, but the writers should not talk about plot outside of the letters and the characters should never meet."


After reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, I really wanted someone to write letters to.  Not just emails or the occasional blog post, but real through the mail on paper letters.  But I couldn't think of anything worth writing about.  My life is really not that exciting and there wasn't anyone I could think of who cared to hear about my day to day activities who doesn't already read my blog.


But after reading Sorcery & Cecelia, I realized I could pretend to be someone else and then I would have all sorts of things to write about!!  My sister says this sounds weird, but I think it sounds like tons of fun!  So, do any of you want to start a letter game with me?  I can't guarantee that I have any sort of creative imagination to make this any fun, but I'm willing to try.  If multiple people wanted to play, we could make up different characters, I'm just not sure how that would work.  I was thinking I would start a new blog to post the letters on so others could read along.  Any takers?  Please?  I think getting mail and writing a story at the same time would be so fun!  If you want to play, make sure you leave your email in the comments so we can swap addresses.  

Needing to Rant

I woke up in a bad mood today.  I am the epitome of cantankerous today.  Then I finished reading a book that did nothing to add to my mood.  So in order to appease my seething soul, I need to rant.  So please bear with me.

I just finished reading two books by Kristin Cashore, Graceling and Fire.  There is a third book in the series in progress right now too.  These books are marketed as young adult and the heroines of the books are in their late teens.  So now let me tell you some of the content of these books.  In Graceling the heroine speaks quite adamantly about how she will never get married because that's giving away her freedoms and her right to independence.  Of course the solution to this is to have a lover with no strings attached.  So that's what she does.  Teenager.  With a lover.  And they have sex in the book.  It's decribed.  Multiple times.  Not graphically, but described nonetheless.  And that's not all.  The bad guy?  Yeah, he likes to cut up small animals and young girls for pleasure, and it's implied that he does other things with those young girls as well.  So I wasn't a fan of these things in the first book, and I sure wouldn't let any young adult girl I know read it, but they were somewhat minor plot points, so I figured I'd read the second one.

It was worse.  The heroine of the second book has been having casual sex with her best friend, who is a guy, since the age of 15.  This same best friend goes on to impregnated a member of the royal family and the heroine's body guard, who is 15.  The hero of the book, who is a prince, got a stable girl pregnant at the age of 16, and he goes on to have sex with the heroine in the book.  There is sex left and right.  And again we have older men taking pleasure in younger girls, women having affairs and getting pregnant with other men's children and so on and so on.  I was ready to throw the book across the room multiple times.

And you know what's so sad about all this?  The stories in this book are very imaginative and creative.  The author is a good writer.  It's just too bad that she feels the need to shove her feminist viewpoints down the throats of young teenage girls.  I don't need a bitter female with obvious father figure issues (all the dads in the books are really messed up) teaching my daughters about how she thinks love and marriage (or the lack thereof) should work.  I'm disgusted and appalled that she feels she has the right to market these books as young adult.  I wouldn't have any problems if they were shelved in the adult section.  But they're not.  They are there for the taking by young teenage girls with pliable, impressionable minds.  It makes me sick.

So for those you with daughters, please don't let them read these books.  And if there was any way I could tell the author how sick I think she is, I probably would.  Unfortunately, the type of woman I imagine her to be, she'll just say that I'm the type of person she's writing the book about, the type of woman all these young girls need to avoid becoming at all costs.  I'm married (gasp!!) and didn't have sex until I was married (double gasp!!).  Do you think I could get the library to re-shelve her books as adult fiction?  It's worth a try, I guess.

But I feel better having ranted and raved, and I hope that maybe this keeps at least one young girl away from these trashy books!!