Two weeks into Preschool Lite, and I'm happy to report we're all surviving. Caleb is learning to put up with my efforts to introduce him to the wonders of crafting, Abby is learning to put up with my efforts to help her learn some patience, and I'm learning that sometimes my goals and my kids' strong wills do not mesh well. So we're all learning to adjust to our adventures in home-preschooling.As promised, I added to our bulletin board the sign that will let Abby know which days are school days. Most other days read "play," and she's becoming very familiar with the words "school" and "play" as she runs to check the bulletin board each morning to see what we'll be up to later. I also added our letter of the week along with some sight words that we'll be reading in her BOB books that week as part of our pre-reading time.
I've picked out a few interesting people from the Bible for us to learn about this year, and this week was about Noah. I figured starting off with the guy who builds a giant floating zoo would be a good way to get Abby interested in learning about some Biblical characters. We read a couple different stories of Noah's Ark and I was pleased to hear Abby recounting the details of the story for Caleb as they played with their Little People Ark during free time.
"The people were very bad," I overheard her telling him, as she acted out the scenes with her plastic animals. "So God told Noah to build a huge boat. Noah obeyed God. And Noah and his family and all the animals got on the boat. And it rained and rained for forty days and forty nights. And then they crashed into a mountain. And all the animals got off the boat, and they saw a beautiful rainbow in the sky."
We also completed a pretty cool Noah's Ark craft for which I've been stashing away popsicle sticks all summer. I'm glad all those banana pops finally paid off. Later, we added Abby's craft to her Bible notebook, which she still thinks is the coolest thing she's ever made. As soon as we were done with craft time, she held up her ark and said, "Put it in my notebook, Mommy!"
I had planned to include a field trip to the zoo this week to go along with all our Noah's Ark talk. So Wednesday we convinced Abby's best friend and her family to join us and we spent the morning outside at the zoo, wondering how in the world Noah put up with that smell for all the time he was stuck on that boat. We fed deer, rode ponies, and got to to pet some bunnies (Caleb's favorite part), then finished up with a picnic lunch, a wagon ride and some quality time in the moon bounce. (By this point, Abby was fairly convinced that preschool might just be the greatest thing ever.) As a bonus, we got a surprise visit from Papa on Thursday, so I postponed our second day of preschool for the week and instead spent a day at the farm with one happy grandpa and two very excited kids.
On Friday it was too nice to be inside, so we took our preschool time outside and did a little crafting and letter a practice. We had prepped for learning to write the lowercase letter a earlier in the week, and Abby was extremely frustrated when her circles didn't look like the ones I showed her. Personally, I thought the little circles she was drawing (or trying to trace) looked great, but she's her own worst critic, and tends to give up when she doesn't accomplish something the way she wants to right away. So she practiced smearing glue onto a letter a I had cut out for her before sprinkling it with sand and black bean "ants," and she practiced drawing the lowercase a in a tray of rice, which proved much more fruitful than her paper-and-crayon attempts.
Later, we took our show on the road and headed to the library for a change of scenery and some more letter practice. Even after we found a cozy little spot all to ourselves next to a window in the children's book section, Abby's must-do-it-right-the-first-time personality won out. After a few minutes of frustration during which she would (a) only attempt to draw a circle with my help, (b) refuse to even try, or (c) draw an only slightly imperfect circle then frantically scribble it out because it wasn't just right, I decided to rethink this whole learning to write our letters thing.
So after retelling the tales of our letter-drawing-induced tantrums for Justin and doing some careful research, we've decided to make one more adjustment to our preschool plan for the year. Beginning next week, we'll be incorporating some Kumon inspiration into our letter learning, beginning with the letters that are easiest to write (straight lines) and moving on to more complicated letters (like that blasted letter a) once the more basic writing skills are established.
**Special thanks to my homeschooling friend Stephanie for pointing me to Raising Rock Stars Preschool, where I first read about this method.
You're welcome! Carter was the same way with writing and drawing. It has just been in the past month he will draw anything and he's 5! I would draw a train and try and get him to draw the circle wheels - nope. He would make a tiny mark and collapse in frustration and say, "You just do it, I can't make them right." A little bit of perfectionist/OCD. I am happy to say that he seems to have outgrown this and is all of a sudden wanting to draw and write letters. She will get there in her own time! That's the beauty of homeschooling - their schedule, not someone else's.
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