Preschool Corner/Week in Review

Selena wakes every morning now begging for school and to talk about something new. Next month is the Homeschool Convention so I hope to bring home some new materials to quench her hunger for learning. She definitely keeps me on my toes as I am constantly trying to come up with new things to talk about.

Reading/Writing

Selena had fun this week revisiting these 5 little books that she truly did not care for throughout our preschool setting. She can read these books pretty independently with just a few hints or helps on just a few words. I do like these books as they are set up just like Progressive phonics, but just a shorter version. Anyone not familiar with Progressive phonics, the idea is to introduce the child to the short vowel sounds, the little books are comprised of cute stories that the parent and child read together. The words that represent the short vowel sound are printed in red, that tells the child it is their turn to read.

Selena decided this week to pull out all of her Kumon workbooks. I usually only give her a few pages at a time when she wants to work on them, but she got into the cabinet and got them on her own. She definitely has her favorite letters to work on, and traces and re traces the letters all the time. She is now getting curious about lower case letters, so we now have a scrambled mess of her Kumon pages. That is ok with me, I just want her to explore them as she sees fit at this point, we have plenty of time for a more formal approach. She does not care for the pages though that have fine motor skill exercises as she says “I can already do those in my sleep.” Where she picked up that phrase is beyond us. I am waiting for her to discover the Kumon book of numbers.

Math:

Selena had fun showing Papa how she has learned to put a simple addition equation together, using her doodle pad. She draws smiley faces, and then asks us to help her with the numbers, since she hasn’t learned to write but a few numbers herself. She can however make the plus sign and equal sign, and successfully finish the equation.

Science:

I love Selena’s take on balance this week. Trying to learn to do a head stand. She is still practicing and is coming pretty close.

We will be back to a more formal science lesson this week.

Geography/History:

We had to answer a question that I posed to Selena when a gray whale got stuck in one of our local rivers. When I asked Selena how the whale got in the river her answer was “He jumped in the river.” We then had to pull out the maps and show Selena that the whale did not jump into the river but swam into the river. This brought up some very interesting discussions and questions, and ended with Selena pleading to the whale, “Swim back into the Ocean and find food.”

Other:

Selena has successfully learned to zip her own jacket now. She has been working hard at learning this skill and this week has been able to do it effortlessly. Outside of being able to button those rascally little buttons, she now is able to totally dress herself from head to toe.

She is sheer delight to travel with in the car, she is discovering or at least talking more about what she sees. The other day headed to Olympia, Selena announced, “We are in the mountains!” I asked her how do you know we are in the mountains? She explained, “I see trees, more trees, and more trees, and we are going up hill!”

I am linking up at Homeschool Creations.