Off to a good start

Considering I had pretty much no idea what I was getting myself into, I'd say Week One of Preschool Lite was a huge success. I've set aside some designated "school time" two days a week and introduced some special "preschool books" that we save for that time in an effort to help Abby understand that we're doing something special. At the end of Day One she asked when we could do preschool again, so I told her we'll make a special sign for her bulletin board that lets her know which days are "school days."

We accomplished exactly what I hoped to accomplish this week during our preschool time. We began reading through some great books from the Sonlight preschool curriculum, including 101 Favorite Stories from the Bible, which includes simple questions at the end of each story to help kids focus on the major points. Abby was frustrated by the questions on Day One, but when we read through two more of the stories on Day Two, she knew what was coming and seemed excited when she knew the right answers at the end.

After reading Crictor, a tale about a green boa constrictor who can wiggle into the shapes of letters and numbers, Abby suggested we play with play doh and make some snakes and letters of our own. While Caleb stamped out sharks, I took the opportunity to review the uppercase alphabet with Abby and was happy to discover she recognized and could sound out every letter.

I tried to incorporate all the fun things that a kid at preschool would enjoy into our preschool time. We had snack time and practiced counting goldfish crackers, and after the kids helped me vacuum up their crumbs, it was time for crafts.

In an effort to help Abby start to understand the basic structure of the Bible (that it's a big book full of lots of little books, and contains tons of different stories that are all part of a bigger story), we're going to spend the year working on her very own Bible notebook. On Day One, she used watercolors to paint a cover for her notebook, and on Day Two I introduced the concept by showing her the notebook I had prepared for her, complete with 66 tabs labeling all the books of the Bible. We reviewed her scripture memory verses from Community Bible Study last year (she still remembered all of them...yay!) and she got to put them in her Bible notebook. This, she told me later, was her favorite activity. I think she likes the giant "button" that opens and closes the three rings of the binder, and the chomping sound it makes when she closes it back. Throughout the year, we'll add worksheets, crafts and memory verses that she does at Community Bible Study or in Sunday School to her notebook so she can start to get a feel for where things happen in the Bible.

We read through a section called "What Happens to Your Food?" in The Usborne Flip-Flap Body Book and I was blown away by just how intrigued Abby was by the concept of the "food tube" and where all the food goes as it travels through her body. We spent a half an hour reading through six pages of everything from which types of food are good for helping you grow, to why we wash germs off our food before we eat it, to the ways our teeth smash our food before it goes down our throats, to how poop is made after the food travels through the large intestine. I learned a lot, and Abby was full of questions the entire time I was reading. Later I gave her some free time to read by herself, and she choose that same book. I couldn't help but smile when I heard her reciting back much of what we had talked about as she turned the pages.
After reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I let the kids make some cookies of their own. This was the first time I've really let Caleb "help" with a cooking project, so things got a little crazy at times. But Abby enjoyed showing him how to do things like hold down the button on the food processor and roll the dough into balls, and they both enjoyed the part at the end where snack time included fresh baked cookies straight from the oven.
Part of my preschool plan for this year includes teaching Abby to write the letters of the alphabet, so we spent part of our time coloring a worksheet that helped her practice the concept of drawing straight lines and drawing from left to right. And (after I let her simply scribble whatever she wanted for a while) my headstrong daughter, who typically balks at doing anything for the first time that isn't her idea, amazed me once again with her willingness to follow my directions, her patience in letting me show her how to trace the lines, and her excitement when she realized she'd done a great job at it. I had to remind myself not to praise her too much. She tends to get overwhelmed and give up more easily when she realizes we're proud of her, preferring to revel quietly in her own personal success. So I watched silently with pleasure as the smile on her face got bigger and bigger as she traced each of the four lines on the page, realizing that somehow this activity meant something to her, which gives me hope for doing more like it in the future.
In addition to all the coloring, baking, reading and painting, we went on an early morning walk around the neighborhood, played dress up like the Emperor after reading The Emperor's New Clothes, sang songs and talked about what all the "fancy words" in some of Abby's favorite hymns mean, decorated pages with stickers for Daddy's office and figured out how to build a playground for our stuffed animals out of our cool new set of wooden blocks.

So after a few hours of home-preschooling, I'm going to go ahead and admit I love this. The kids had a blast doing all of our preschool activities, and I can already see the benefit of involving Caleb in what we're doing in how his attention span for things like storytime and crafting has increased over the past week. Abby told me she loves preschool and was a little concerned at lunch when I told her we were done for the day. I promised there would be more preschool in her future, and she perked right back up.