Our First Week of Home Preschool

With so many changes coming in the next weeks/months, I felt that keeping Brody at home with me for the time being was a better transition.  He has already gotten used to not going to school this past month during the holidays so we are going to stick with our new routine.  The next few weeks are going to really test us because Daddy will be gone for a majority of the week beginning his new job in Raleigh.  He is going to be super busy as his work calendar is already filling up for the month.  We hope he will be able to find some time to also house hunt a little for us, and I have been searching and sending him house listings to look into.  Part of the reason I want to keep Brody home with me is to allow me the opportunity to work with him on some areas that I just don't feel he is getting at preschool.  They do a wonderful theme based curriculum that is fun and teaches good social skills, but I think he has been missing some of the more basic early learning instruction.  He needs more practice learning to recognize and write his letters, including his name, and practice with his shapes, colors, and numbers.  I have been working to develop a dual curriculum where we will do some fun theme based lessons as well as some basic skill building lessons.  For our first week, we learned and gained more practice with the letter A, the color red, and the circle.

I created this little board to help us keep track of our basic weekly lessons.  We talk about our calendar everyday and review our letter of the week, color, and shape.  Included in this lesson is a weekly Bible verse that goes with our letter.  Our first verse for A was "Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find. Matthew 7:7"

We read books about things that start with A like this book about Airplanes.

We are going to try to utilize many of our own stash of books like this one that Brody got from his Scholastic book sale.  This will give us a good excuse to dig out some books that we haven't really read a lot.  Books tend to get buried and forgotten about. 

Brody will also practice his coloring skills with some great free printables I found for each letter courtesy of Pinterest.  His coloring skills really amaze me as he is doing so well staying in the lines.  He also has a really good pencil/crayon grasp although when his hand gets tired, he will try to switch hands.  I told him that does not work very well. 

Brody also practiced tracing his letter A with some great "free" tracing worksheets that I also found on Pinterest.

Our first week's theme based curriculum involved discussing snow so we started with reading this beloved classic:

I actually couldn't find my copy of this book.  We love this author and have several of his wonderful books.  This is definitely one of my favorites so I was very disappointed.  Then, I thankfully found it "free" online and a great video reading. 

One of Brody's favorite activities for the week was counting "snowballs."  He loves counting, and he really liked using his tongs to pick up "snowballs" (cotton balls) and counting out the number on a card.

We also decorated snowflakes by gluing "snowballs" to cut out snowflakes.  Brody did such a good job using the glue by himself.

Then, he wanted to hang them up by himself.  He wasn't quite tall enough though. 

Our sweet little snowflakes made a great addition to the mantle after Christmas decorations came down. 

For extra special fun, we made Play Snow with just baking soda and hair conditioner.  It was a little messy, but it was still fun.  I kept adding more baking soda because my batch seemed pretty goopy, and our poor snowman could not stand up.  Brody still loved playing with it so I would recommend this little activity.  The mess was pretty easy to clean up since the ingredients sort of acted as cleaning agents themselves.  We did this project after reading "The Snowy Day" so we sort of tried to follow Peter's activities from the book.

We made tracks in the snow like Peter.  This was Brody's stick like Peter's. 

Superman helped us make some tracks too. 

But our poor snowman just could not stand on his own. 

On Wednesday, we had a little "field trip" to take Cocoa to the vet for some shots, and on Thursday, our activities involved getting ready for Daddy's birthday, including making his birthday cards, meeting him for lunch at Chick-fil-a, and picking up some balloons and making him a football cake.  After we made Daddy's card with finger paint, we made a little finger paint masterpiece.  I have been hesitant to try "painting" at home for fear of the mess, but Brody really did so well so I think we will do more in the future.

Finger painting fun. 

He enjoyed trying out all the colors and then mixing them together. 

He has to cheese for the camera. 

Mommy made an A for apple. 

So our hope is that we can keep up this weekly preschool routine for the next couple of months and perhaps finish out Brody's 3rd year of preschool.  We also hope Brody will gain some necessary skills to help him excel in his future school years.