Playing School

Day 2 and the home school boat is still afloat!

I still have no idea what I am trying to teach or even the order in which to teach it, but boy do I ever have a ever growing notebook of wonderful ideas!  Now, I just need to start reviewing all of the ideas and try to put in place some sort of preschool/ tiny tot curriculum.  Until I get to all of that and try to make some of this more formal, we are still just "playing school".

The day has been fun, and very much going at Lil Red's pace.  She is calling all of the shots.  After about 10-20 minutes on 1 thing, she looks at me and says,"okay, I am all done."  Well, okay then, that's that.  Then she comes back in a few minutes and asks to play again.

I can tell that Baby Bear wants to do everything that his sister is doing, and if I am looking in his sister's direction he is quick to crawl on a chair, couch, or stool yelling to get my attention!  Sheesh!

Note to self:  When thinking of preschool/ tiny tot curriculum, I must also put somethings in place for brother to do!

Here are some pictures of things that we worked on for today.  I am telling ya, great stuff from that 1+1+1=1 blog.  She takes a lot of pictures, and I just kick myself thinking... humpf, why didn't I think of that!  Fun stuff!

Today, we talked about shapes.  Red pretty confidently calls out shapes (square, heart, circle, oval, octagon (weird, I know), rectangle, triangle), but today I started to ask her to draw circles around things.  Here is one of her circles (I was impressed).

I printed off some printables from the 1plus1plus1equals1.net website.  There is a lot of great stuff there.  On the site, the mommy talks about how she has put together a notebook for her daughter, and there are printables inside the clear paper holder thingys (totally drawing a blank so forgive as I call something a paper holder thingy), but then she got washable dry erase markers/ crayons and the child can write all over these things (and you do not have to print them off a bajillion times)!  So smart, I thought!  Red loves coloring the pages and you can even see that she kind of traced an A!  She loves to write/ scribble all over her pages.  We both call this her workbook!

Here is another page from the "workbook".  I let her play with the large dot art markers (I call then Bingo dotters), but I was asking if she could dot all of the A's on a page, or apples on a page.  This just gave us some more time to talk about the letter A.

She really enjoys drawing with the markers.  She looks up and says that she's writing.

Other things we have done today is going over the names of fruits.  My friend, Katherine, suggested that I talk about foods that start with the letter A.  Hello!  Apples!  So we would take a bite and say "Apple starts with A"!

We also played with Leggos and read some books, and worked on a few puzzles today.

The highlight of the day was probably going to our local gardening place, Bogle City, and picking up some flowers.  The kids were very excited to see their Aunt Erin and her new baby Lukas!  I shared in that excitement, but the bonus was to see all of the animals at the pond (swans) and the horses in the field.  Lil Red was all about feeding the horses some rocks (next time, we must bring apples!)