Preschool Corner/Week 3 2010

I realized that one year ago this month, my blog finally took on the theme that I have become so passionate about. I had been playing around with my blog not really knowing what to write about. Then Natalie at Mouse Grows Mouse Learns, really gave me the idea of blogging about our adventures in homeschooling and raising Selena. Natalie and I had met on the IVillage parenting boards. She invited me to visit her blog, and the rest was history. So a huge Thank you to Natalie for the inspiration! Also thank you to all of you my followers, and blogging friends for making this year so wonderful. Your comments, encouragement, ideas, and support has truly been the BEST part of my blogging adventure!

To think we went from this:

To this:

In one year! I look forward to sharing this year with all of you!

Ok now for our week in school:

Reading:

While we continue to review the vowel sounds, we are jumping a head in our phonics and reading to start looking at consonants and vowel sounds, along with our word flash cards that go with our first reader. Selena already knows a good number of the words in her reader, and is jumping right in to learn this new form of phonics that I am presenting to her.

We took a look at color words this week. I made a card for each of the colors, red, blue, black, brown, orange, yellow, purple and green. I had a game all ready to go using different things we had, that Selena would have to match the color with the word. I knew she knew how to read some of the colors from her reading books, but wasn’t sure about all of them. She surprised me and cut our game short, as she whipped out every word on the cards before we even got started.

In her workbook her assignment was to look at 5 words, 4 of which were spelled correctly while one was incorrect, this was using the color words. She had to identify the word that was incorrectly spelled. She realized that this is not as easy as it appears, and takes a little more concentration on her part. Once she figured that out, she did great with the assignment.

Math:

Selena enjoyed watching the baseball game with Papa. He was doing a great job of teaching her about the score, how to count balls, strikes and even how many pitches were pitched per player. Too bad the game had a rain delay, so they didn’t get to finish this lesson.

I made word cards for one through ten. I again knew that Selena would know some of the number words, just didn’t expect her to know most of them. The one that stumped her the most was the number eight. Again she wanted to hurry through this, and just assume that the card I would give her after six was seven or five, so that it made some sense of order to her. Once she figured out that I indeed had them all scrambled and there was no pattern to how I presented them, she put her little mind to work to actually read the words. She did great!

Geography:

We took a look at the State of Pennsylvania, this week. Selena was so happy to get her scrapbook out and work on that again after our little break.  I have had a few comments about Selena’s coloring, I thought I would share, that while Selena is very obsessed with coloring within the lines, she is so slow, it takes her about 5 to 10 minutes to color one of the small states on her US map. One day as we colored together, she informed me, that I needed to slow down and be careful to stay in the lines. Maybe this is why she doesn’t like arts and crafts very well, she is too much of a perfectionist about her coloring anymore.

Science:

We lacked again in Science this week. I did have Selena come in and help me make french toast and we discussed how the heat of the pan changes the appearance of the food as it cooks. We also added cinnamon to the egg and talked about how this made our french toast taste different. We also talked about how the cinnamon smelled, it’s texture, and overall appearance.

Other:

Selena is now enrolled in dance for the upcoming year. She begins September 13th. We are staying with the same dance school we tried last year, since it is so close to home. I really like the sound of the other dance school in Aberdeen, but they don’t usually start them out until they are 4, so there is no guarantees that Selena would make the cut for the class. While that instructor offers a month trial for 3 year olds, I don’t want to take a chance that she won’t make the cut, then we would still end up starting here in Montesano, and be behind again like last year.

Selena discovered the world of legos. She has had so much fun building, and has been very good about making sure she puts them all away before starting something else. We have decided to take her bins that we got for her toys and set them up in our little classroom area. In the top bins I have placed her pattern blocks in one, a puzzle in another one, then she has her legos. She can choose which activity she wants to do, take the bin to the table, then before she can pull another bin out, or toy, she has to make sure her bin is put away. So far we have only had to remind her of the rule a couple of times.

While Selena is discovering that this year there will be a little more work required on her part, I am also getting a good feel for how to present the materials to best fit Selena’s learning style. I am sure that this year will really give us both a great foundation and understanding of each other, Selena and her learning style, and my teaching style.