Pre to the K - this weeks pictures

Fine motor practice - sharpening a pencil. Yay for things that are weird and actually count as school. Just think for a second you need to be able to hold both objects. Hold one still and rotate the other while not dropping the pencil. Forcing the pencil into the sharpener but not too hard. Sharpening until it's sharp but not so much as to brake the tip.

This is a useful skill and fine motor control practice. Perfect for pre-kers or kindy students lagging in motor control.

A game from the sonlight p4/p5 teachers manual. Each player has an ice cube. You roll a die and depending on which number comes up you either add salt to your cube, blow on it, place it in water.... etc. First player whos' ice cube melts whens. 

Covering Science, math, following directions, taking turns.

Cutting Practice. We read stone soup and followed it up by making veggie soup for lunch.

Fantastic fine motor control practice!

( For this I gave the baby his own bits of potato and the wooden play knife so he could 'cut' too)

Attempting to grow a carrot and potato. We hallowed out the inside and added water to them. Failed Failed Failed but it was fun to try.

Science

The Letter I - a giant I on a scroll. "Here ye here ye I proclaim to all the land!"

Literacy, letter recognition.

I got these fantastic geometric shapes at a retired teachers yard sale. We like to fill them up with rice. Sometimes we weigh them against each other eg. is a sphere heavier then a cylinder?

Sometimes we just make a mess which is fun too.

And a bonus: I learned what the difference is between a triangle pyramid and a square pyramid.

spatial recognition, fine motor (pouring), math

Rhythm

Randomly in Fairbanks Alaska we have a marvelous waldorf toy store. One of the two owners of it is doing a 4 part lecture at the local UU church about brining waldorf home both for homeschoolers as well as for parents who want a little waldorf flavor in their childrens lives.

Tonight was part one - Rhythm.

Rhythm... an often sought after thing in the world of children regardless of if homeschooling or not. Often Rhythm is confused with a schedule.

a schedule looks something like this:

7:00 wake up get dressed
7:30 Brakefast
8:15 chores
8:45 school
Noon lunch
12:45 quite time / naps
2:00 outside time

a Rhythm looks likes this:

7:00 wake up get dressed
breakfast
chores
school
Noon lunch
quite time / naps
outside time

On first glance these appear to be exactly the same and this is where the confusion comes in. Both are the same. The only really difference is the clock. A rhythm means that after -this- comes -that-. So after lunch it is always quite time. After quite time is outside time. Sometimes lunch takes 20 minutes and sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes everyone naps for 2 hours and sometimes you're lucky if you get 30 minutes.

Both systems intend to keep people in the flow of things the problem with a schedule is that when something takes an hour instead of 30 minutes or the kids end up getting involved in a activities that ends up taking most of the day instead of the time alloted it throws everything off. The kids may or may not care but the parents get out of wack and when Mamas not happy, nobodies happy.

Rhythm is intended to let both parents as well as children know what to expect next in their day (kisses good night and lights out always follow the bedtime story) but allows for things to flow at their own natural pace.

Preschool Fun this week

This week was a lot of fun for us. My little guy is 3 1/2 so we are doing a mix of preschool and kindergarten. We have being 'doing school' since he was one and a half I have a bit of a curriculum habit so I use a ton of different resources but we started with (and are still using) Little Acorn Learning. At first I used it as a general concept idea and had to modify it a bunch since he was so little. This year I need to modify very little and I love the use of weekly themes that I don't have to plan.

We are also using Oak Meadows kindergarten program with some modification for the fine motor control components. Being 3 he can not yet form letters or really draw more then a circle or a scribble. But he 'gets it' other then that one thing.

Sonlight is a chirstan homeschooling program that is commonly used in the homeschooling community. Now I'm not thrilled with the bible aspects of the program BUT their reading list (minus the bible books) are FANTASTIC.
We are using there P3/P4 guide book as a good rule of thumb for adding books into our homeschooling program. What I like most is that some of the books are great classics I had just forgotten about and others are books I had never heard of. Wonderful additions to our home library.



Yule (almost 7) Doing a puppet show for the baby out of a cardboard box. Ah the wonderful uses of a box.

Loch (3 1/2) Practicing some practical skills, using the wash board to wash his clothes.


We decided to do some dying with silk we had to make new play silks then I also got it in my head to while we were at it to try dying some of the babies diapers.

Look mom it looks like a kite!