Preschool Corner/Week for Reflection

I had to use this week to examine how we are teaching, and learning. While Selena does enjoy her curriculum doing workbook pages, she really enjoys a lot of freedom and hands on activities. This summer when I was feeling a little burned out we slowed way down on these activities unless they were family outings, which yes, Selena loved, we all did. When we started school again, I didn’t prepare myself well enough with a lot of hands on activities. I guess I figured they would just happen, but you know they don’t just happen, we have to make them happen.

Monday evening was a real eye opener to my lack of being organized. Let me first say when we went to look at the church building, I should have gotten a babysitter for Selena instead of expecting her to go and just understand that we were doing grown up work. Usually when we go to places like this old church building we are going to a museum where we learn, there is a lot of hands on, talking, discussing, Selena input and fun. That night our focus truly was on being with the others in the congregation looking at every aspect of this old building to see if we felt it was something that we really wanted to take on. Selena did not understand this, and expected it to be a field trip for her. We truly did not include Selena in any of the experience, but expected her to just be there while we investigated.

I had to ask how could we have approached this differently? Well, as I mentioned we could have gotten a babysitter. Though, we didn’t we could have been more careful in including Selena a bit more then we did. As I said I didn’t even take my camera. To be honest I don’t know much about Hoquiam, so I had no idea what we were going to see. I had never even heard of this church, let alone realized before we got there that we truly were going to see some history.

Many times others who are not around Selena do not give her credit for being as bright as she is. Selena does not take to having her intelligence questioned. It wasn’t long after she told our Pastor her hypothesis, that the melt down began. Pastor’s wife asked her what she thought of the basement classroom, she didn’t even give Selena a chance to answer her question, now Selena was really getting frustrated. While I am strong in my beliefs that Selena needs to learn and to understand that at these times she does still need to behave and not question our authority, or any other adult. I have to step back a bit and put myself in her shoes. She truly thought we were on a field trip, but we were not teaching her. She wanted to be taught.

What have I learned from this experience, and what do I want to share with all of you, our children deserve to know that even we as parents make mistakes. They deserve the right to know that even we can learn from our mistakes, we can make changes, and by working as a family can bring peace back into our home. We are their model, if we expect them to learn from their mistakes, then we have to set the example of how this is done. We need to show them that not every mistake is horrible, and that their are some great ways to resolve our mistakes, change things around to make things better. We will be going through our curriculum and enhancing it with more hands on.

While this week was a huge eye opener for both my husband and myself, we embraced it with joy that we learned together more about our granddaughter. We look forward now to moving forward implementing more Selena inspired learning, and truly just having fun in our school.

We finished up the week with many hands on activities. We worked a little more with our new math concept in geometry.

We did some art work:

But mostly it made me rethink how we will be doing school yet again this year. It also made me rethink how we would be doing school from here on out.

Selena started dance this week. She had fun, but was a little disappointed when she found out she would not be taking tap dance after she practiced so hard all summer to learn how to do the shuffle step without holding onto something. Instead they are visiting jazz this year. Now we have to go see if the shoe store will exchange her new tap shoes for jazz shoes.

To see what others are doing in their preschools visit Homeschool Creations.