Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Our preschool day on Monday, August 26

Note: I found this still in my drafts. Thought I'd hit publish. I have no idea what we did the rest of that day, so I can't finish the post. Heh.

This morning, I quickly threw together some activity cards for the kids to do and we got to work.

I pulled out the Lauri uppercase and lowercase puzzles first. The MFWK set came with I think the lowercase? But I also bought an uppercase, since we could make good use of it and if I had one puzzle set for each child that would go waaaay better.

They played with the letters, matched them to the pictures underneath the puzzle, and put them back. I had Johnny count to see how many letters there were in the alphabet. He can count to 100, but sometimes he skips #13. Does he think he's a hotel with a 13th floor or something?

Next up, workbooks. Did two pages in Developing The Early Learner (a simple trace-maze thing and a match an item to the big picture thing). That page showed a picture of a lit match, and then a picture of a campfire and a picture of trees. He was supposed to color the picture of the thing the match went along with. Instead, I had him circle it. We were going to do more coloring in a minute.

Next up, we read the Adam and Eve story in our Bible Pictures to Color/Read books. This time, I read the story while they colored. I'm not really sure if it's an approach I want to take too often -- not sure how much Johnny was listening but many kids *do* listen better while coloring, so who knows. We had some discussion after I read the story.

Vivie didn't want to color that page in her coloring book. She just kind of wants to do her own thing with it, and really I'm going to let her I think. Mainly I want to keep her entertained and occupied, rather than "color this correctly."

I grabbed another workbook for her to flip through and do. She likes doing "paths" (mazes) so she sorta did a few, and colored some things.

I had Johnny do two pages in the Counting With Numbers book. We're on number 4, and he just isn't interested in the repetitive nature of writing a bunch of 4s. Didn't push it. Not that big of a deal. So he did the next page which had him count and label objects with the appropriate number. We'll hit handwriting again with his kindergarten, so at this point it's just exposure and if he will form the letters and numbers correctly, that's great.

Following that, Johnny asked if he could do a craft. Sure! I asked which supplies he wanted me to grab, and he wanted a paper plate, some googly eyes and his markers and glue.

Great deal on some educational DVDs

We picked up the boxed set of Liberty's Kids and Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? a few weeks back, and we've watched several episodes together.








They're decent, with some educational content within.

Liberty's Kids focuses on the American Revolution and the Carmen Sandiego one is different than the game show -- it's an animated series tracking Carmen the thief around the world. So it's more geography/cultural/etc. based, I suppose.

Anyway, each show's boxed set contains 40 episodes. At $5.99 per boxed set, that's an insanely cheap deal.

Use it in conjunction with your studies on the American Revolution, or maybe a geography thing, or just for when you are laying on the couch nursing a tiny baby and would rather have something like that vs. total drivel.

Episode list for Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?

Episode list for Liberty's Kids and see the main website for extras