Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apple. Show all posts

Saturday, October 04, 2008

September

September was a busy month! Not only did I start doing preschool with Kate, but volleyball started as well. Kate loves "doing school". She asked to do school as soon as she woke up this morning. Apparently I need to have things for her to do even on Saturday. I enjoy planning everything we're going to do, but it is time consuming since most of the things we do involve quite a bit of prep work. As she gets older, I imagine the prep work will be less.



After "apple" week, our theme was safety. Most of the theme ideas I'm using are from a book called Themes to Grow On. It's a book for 4 to 6 year olds, so I have to adjust some of the activities, but she is able to do most of them. For safety week, she learned what different signs meant, and we talked about fire, water and home safety. I don't think this was her favorite subject, but it's always good to talk about these things every so often.



The next theme was teddy bears. We read a lot of books about teddy bears, and did quite a few sorting activities. Luckily, she has way too many stuffed bears or this wouldn't have worked. We had all of her bears out and she had to sort them from smallest to largest. She did this pretty well, she did need help when she was doing the smallest bears. One lesson that I liked was math with Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It's easy to teach sizes and sorting with this book.




At the end of the week I try to come up with an activity or a "field trip" that goes along with the theme. At the end of teddy bear week, we took her to Build A Bear. She loved it! She was very funny interacting with the people who worked there. They were a little strange and overly outgoing, so she would just stare at them whenever they asked her anything. It took quite awhile to finish her bear, because they have a ridiculous variety of bear clothes. She finally settled on a princess outfit complete with pink shoes, a crown and a wand. She wanted to just name it Bear, but eventually she agreed to name her Giselle.


Every week we go over two letters of the alphabet as well as one number. She already knows her abc's and numbers up to about 14, but she is learning the letter sounds. I am not teaching her to write, but when she was learning the letter E she actually wrote her first letter! On her white board she made a lowercase e. I had left to go get something, and when I came back she said "Look Mommy, a little e!" It was so cute!!!



I'll write about what we did last week on a different post, because this is really long already. I have more September things to write about, so maybe I'll actually have more than one post per month!

Monday, September 08, 2008

A Good Monday

I think I mentioned in my last post that I was starting "school" with Kate. Each week we have a theme and we do different activities and workbooks covering language arts, math, science, social studies, cooking and art. We are doing pretty basic things, I'm not too crazy! This week our theme is Apples. Today I put apple cutouts all over the house, and she had to go find them all and put them in a basket. I figured she would like this, but I had no idea how much. I ended up having to do this many, many times. We also made a book about apples, after she listed her favorite things about apples. I was not really sure when I chose what we are doing if she would be able to, but she is always surprising me with how much she understands. It's been really fun so far being her teacher!



Everett is coming more "alive" everyday! He smiles all the time and is such an easy going little guy. I love the little noises he makes, and he is always moving. That's kind of scary actually! He goes for his 2 month check up later this week, and I'm excited to see how much he has grown. I'm pretty sure he'll be in the 90th percentile or higher. Kate always is and he seems bigger to me.



Tonight we had dinner with our volleyball team. It's something the team does every week. Thirteen girls between the ages of 14 and 18...it made me happy that I don't have a teenager. No matter how hard it is to have a toddler, I was thinking tonight how much harder (in a very different way) it will be to have teenagers.



Well, it took me a few days to write something again, but at least I did :)