Full of surprises

Have I mentioned that my kids love crafts? I started getting crafty with Abby when she was two months shy of her second birthday. Caleb's been indoctrinated a little earlier, and I'm pleasantly amazed at his growing affection for glue and construction paper. It sure makes the crafting portion of our preschool days a lot more fun when both kids will join in. I wasn't sure how that would go when we got started, but Caleb's proved a willing participant. I may need to pace myself....we're running out of room on our craft wall now that we're turning out double the projects each week. And on that note, special thanks to the chick at No Time For Flashcards for inspiring this week's letter t craft for my choo-choo-loving little man and his sister (and to Michael's, for having these super cool Thomas the Tank Engine alphabet stickers in stock).
We started working in our Kumon lowercase letter workbook this week. I honestly wondered, when I placed my order, if it wasn't going to be a little gimmicky. But it was only six bucks, so I decided to give it a chance. The letter-writing methods in the workbook seem so obvious and simple, and Abby absolutely loves doing her letter worksheets now. This is a huge change from the borderline tantrums I was dealing with when we first started. Whatever the gimmick is, it's working on my 3-year-old, and I'm not complaining. She's intense and meticulous when she's trying to write her letters now, and I'm learning not to interrupt or encourage her while she's concentrating. She's a self-motivator, and my praise only seems to get in the way. Since Caleb will still let me talk to him when he's coloring, I printed out some alphabet coloring pages that he can scribble on during our coloring/letter-learning time, though I'll admit he prefers his coloring book full of pictures of cars and trucks. I don't blame him.
My preschool package from Sonlight came with this teddy bear matching game, and I wasn't really sure what to do with it. So this week I just gave the kids some pieces and a little bit of direction to see if maybe they had better ideas than me. Turns out, they do. Abby invented her own memory game with four pairs of bears, and even thought to distract Caleb from stealing them by giving him his own matching set of bears to play with. When Caleb started hiding his bears in the living room, Abby decided hide-and-seek was a great idea, so she handed over the remainder of her precious bears for Caleb to hide, then together they went back and found all of them. (And, at my urging, made some matches. So there...I helped.) Now Abby regularly asks to play her teddy bear game, and I've had to hide the box to keep them from taking it out all the time and losing the pieces everywhere.
We're continuing to work on our sight words, which is going really well. Abby had familiarized herself with her four new words by the end of the week, and even picks them out in books now as we read together. She hates the pressure of being asked to identify a word though, so I have to get creative with how I "quiz" her to see which ones she knows. We also introduced some basic math concepts this week and did some simple addition/subtraction exercises involving balls of cookie dough and goldfish. She seemed pretty excited about the whole addition thing, but when I started taking cookies away, she made it clear subtraction was not her favorite part of math time.In summary, our fourth week of Preschool Lite was full of pleasant surprises. I'm still constantly surprised by how much I love this process, and how much my kids enjoy it. I'm surprised at how much this little girl is capable of figuring out and achieving. And I'm surprised at how time flies on our preschool days, and how sad the kids are when we pack up our supplies until next time. The best compliment came Thursday night, as I was tucking Abby in. I told her to get some good rest so that we could do something fun when she woke up.

"Are we going to do preschool tomorrow?" she asked excitedly. Good to know she's having as much fun as I am.