A Is For Apples, Art & Appearance

New Fish isn't old enough for preschool (barely) but she is ready to have "school" and learn a few things.  I don't want to put her in school early because they grow up so fast as it is.  So my friend C and I decided to do our own little school this year.  We have taken a lot of ideas from Montessori and hopefully most of our activities will be very sensory based.  We will be doing a lot of hands on learning with a few household chores thrown in.  We've also taken a few ideas from Waldorf, especially the circle time and some of the stories and songs we will be using.  Some things will be from Joy School.  We also have fun things planned that we've seen around or have done in our own families.  We plan to do a lot of music and art.  We want to introduce the alphabet with nursery rhymes and songs.   I've been preparing stuff all summer long. It should be pretty fun.  Wish me luck and if you have any brilliant ideas for weekly themes or fun projects, please pass them along.

 Today was the first day of our home school, preschool.  We call it Buddy/Wynn school after the nicknames the kids have for each other.  Once a week I will be teaching the two kids and my friend C will be teaching once a week.  Red Fish will usually be at school during this time but we started a day late because of our art fieldtrip yesterday.  We started our morning by checking out the calendar and talking about the letter A.  We sang songs and read poems about apples.  We cut one in half so we could look at the star inside and the seeds.  We ate apples.  Then we sang "Way Up High In The Apple Tree" and several other songs.  The kids love using the instruments and the parachute.  They are always a hit.  We read books on apples, the letter A and on colors.

 Next we practiced using scissors.  I had drawn bubble letters in glitter glue so they could try and stay on the lines.  They all need more time with the scissors.

We are planning on spending the next few months talking about our five senses.  This week we are concentrating on sight.  We talked about some of the things we can see with our eyes, color and shape in particular.  We used several sets of flash cards to see if they could tell the difference between a letter and not a letter.  We talked about "the same" vs. "different."  We used a set of erasers to match things up.  Then we reviewed  our colors and shapes.  They are already very solid on these but it's always good to talk about them again.  We took some paint chips and lined them up from lightest to darkest in each color.  Then we played with all of our file folder games that have to do with shapes or color matching. The kids love the file folders. 

 We cut more apples up (ate more slices) and made apple prints.

I am planning on doing a sensory tub every month.  Hopefully we can make it through September with a water table before the weather changes.  We used measuring cups, sieves and funnels today.  The kids ended up pretty wet and they played for a good long time.  When Buddy's mom came, we had to send her away for more playtime.

 To wrap things up we did a "magic trick".  I drew shapes onto watercolor paper with a white crayon and then when they rolled over the paper with watercolor, the shapes appeared and we reviewed them again.

And then we got the play tents out and ran around the backyard.  I'm looking forward to doing this with New Fish.  It is fun to think of things to do with her and ways to teach her.