I'll admit it....the office supply-loving, should-have-been-a-teacher side of me really loves this home preschool stuff. I love opening up my big three-ring notebook and planning our preschool days. I love my spreadsheets of sight words and craft ideas and memory verses. And I love reminding myself why I'm doing this: to spend time with my kids, to pour into them in ways that someone other than their parents simply can't, to teach them how to think and not what to think, and to make sure they get to enjoy this stage of life as much as possible.
And with that in mind, we read a bunch of stories about the changing of seasons and then headed outside to do what these kids do best. They explored, they observed, they asked questions, and they took turns leading the way on our favorite nature trail, completely overwhelmed by how much it has changed since the last time we were there. Caleb is quickly turning into my more adventurous one, or perhaps Abby was just moving more slowly because she was taking it all in. But while her brother forged ahead, I had the opportunity give her little mind a framework for understanding the world around her as we talked about the creative God that made all these colors, all these leaves, all these trees, and every funny sounding bird or bug that passed us by. She pointed out how beautiful everything was, and I reminded her that the same God who made all these things made her as well.
"And you are one of the best things God made," I told her, for perhaps the billionth time. Because it's true. And when this year of preschool is over, it won't matter if she can write her name or read a simple story. If she understands a little bit more about the character of God and how deeply He loves her, I'll know I've done my job.
Since their love of being outside ranks as high as their love of crafts, and since I had planned a particularly messy one this week, we took our alphabet craft to the backyard this week and created these awesome letter f's out of feathers that I stocked up on during an overzealous moment at the craft store last year. True to form, Abby was meticulous about color choice and feather placement, while Caleb was content to smear glue as far as he could get away with and then drop handfuls of feathers from great heights for maximum speed and coverage.
Caleb's been counting to two lately, usually when we're on the road and he sees "one, two busses!" or "one, two big big trucks!" go by. He spots pairs in the unlikeliest of places, pointing out two helicopters flying overhead as easily as two pieces of fuzz on his socks. So I figured I'd capitalize on his fascination with vehicles and see if I could turn it into teaching him to count to three, and identify and verbalize some colors and shapes as well. I printed up these little dump trucks in three different colors, then tasked Justin with cutting out matching shapes for each. The hard work paid off. Caleb (and Abby, for that matter) loved his truck game and happily matched the shapes to their appropriate colored trucks. We worked on counting to three out loud as he would put shapes on top of the trucks, and something apparently stuck. Later, Justin told me Caleb correctly counted "one, two, three ducks" that they were looking at together.
We managed to squeeze in an impromptu lesson on proper espresso-making techniques, and coupled it with a lesson on serving others as I walked Abby through the steps necessary for preparing and delivering a delicious Caffè Americano for her dad, and a yummy mocha for her mom. I find that being properly caffeinated seriously improves my mothering.
And because I didn't want to let all those pumpkin seeds from our three tiny pumpkins go to waste, and because I wanted to do one more craft, and because it's been forever since I let the kids paint, we spent a lot of time working on this little project that involved painting way too many tiny pumpkin seeds orange.
Thankfully I'd had the foresight to enlist Justin's help in preparing some orange seeds the night before. The kids slopped so much paint on theirs that there's no way they would have been dry in time for us to do the second part of this cool craft, which required them to affix those tiny orange seeds to a pumpkin drawn on a piece of paper and drenched in glue.
Week seven at the School of Mommy got an A+ in their book, and in mine. Have I mentioned how much I love my job?
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