Change will do you good

We've gotten into a pretty good preschool routine in the few months we've been at it. Tuesdays and Thursdays are school days, and Abby loves to see "School" listed as her activity of the day on her bulletin board twice a week. We read, we cook, we sort, we count, we snack, we match, we build, we share, we draw, we craft, and we play hard until lunch time. These are my favorite days, for they are school days for me as well. All laundry, errands, e-mails and household projects are set aside on these mornings, and my kids get my full attention (and I get theirs) as we learn and play together.

But good routines can lead to monotony, and sometimes the only way to break the monotony is to do something absolutely insane. This week, that something was a field trip to Starbucks, with all three kids, all by myself. I call it a field trip, because it was totally educational. Caleb was assigned the task of locating colors and shapes all over the store during our coffee break, and Abby brought along her sight word flash cards. Over a couple of tall hot chocolates and blueberry scones, we worked through this week's words until she was confident enough to build a sentence all by herself for the first time. Even the guy beside us took a break from his Washington Post to congratulate her on successfully assembling the phrase "The little kitty is yellow."

Back inside our own four walls, we worked on a letter k craft, making kites out of construction paper and decorating them with crayons, clouds and yarn. Caleb's really starting to take ownership of his crafting, and is requiring less and less intervention from dear old mom when it comes to things like applying glue and deciding where things should go.
Abby is still loving her letter worksheets. Each time we sit down to color, she carefully picks out a dark crayon--"one that will really show up, Mommy"--practices drawing the letters on the worksheet, then signs her name at the top and tells me to put it away somewhere where it won't get lost before asking for another page to work on. We've been working on some number worksheets as well, and she's showing a lot of improvement in figuring out and following basic illustrated instructions without having to ask me to tell her what she's supposed to do. Color-by-number activities are some of her favorites right now, and she's eager to learn to read her colors so that she can do them all by herself. (She can read the words "yellow" and "pink" on her own so far.)

I usually give the kids some free time during our morning preschool activities during which time they can get some space from each other and do something on their own while I feed Jacob or clean up a play dough mess or whatever. Lately, Abby has been defaulting to taking down all of her word cards from the bulletin board and challenging herself with them. She'll go through the cards one at a time, and each time she can read a word, she lays it down on the floor to build a road for ponies or cars to cross. When she doesn't know a word, she puts it back in the stack and I can overhear her telling herself, "This one's tricky. Let's try that one later." She's a great self-motivator, and that's one of the things I really love about my three-year-old.

Now if I could just get her to take that much interest in cleaning up the playroom, we'd have it made.