Preschool report: May

So now we have finished our second month of preschool. Our focus this month was the joy of the body. It was a lot of fun, and we all learned a lot. One day Helen told me, "I have a beautiful body!" That is exactly what I was hoping she'd feel.

The first week I checked out a five senses story kit from the library, and we focused on learning the five senses. Helen loved reading the books and doing the activities. The second week I checked out a whole bunch of books about the body and different body systems. One favorite was Inside Your Outside, a Cat in the Hat book. It's not written by Dr. Seuss (the author is Tish Rabe), but reading it you would think it was. Helen also loved the Magic School Bus books that were about the body. We also traced the kids on a big piece of paper and let them color it. We played Simon Says to learn the names of different parts of the body (Simon says touch your shins. Simon says pat your hips.)

The third week we talked about how our bodies are temples and how to take care of them. We learned about the Word of Wisdom.

And then the last week was a lot of fun. I found a Youtube channel called Dance and Beats. It has dances for preschool kids. I picked three that I thought were good, and we danced Monday, Wednesday and Friday for preschool. We danced the crab walk, little butterfly and catch a fish. Eric really liked catch a fish, and Helen liked little butterfly. They both really liked crab walk. It was a lot of fun to use our bodies for art! I wanted to take pictures of the kids dancing, but I couldn't find the camera all that week.

For the first part of the month I was using Sandi Queen's Language Lessons for Little Ones Vol. 1. But it wasn't meeting Helen's needs. It was a lot of fun in some ways. But Helen was way beyond it when it came to letter recognition. But she wasn't ready to write the letters yet. She tries, but it wasn't working very well. And I realized I needed something that didn't require a child to learn to write while they are learning to read. The curriculum that I would prefer is out of print and so is very unaffordable.

So I checked out a whole stack of books on phonics and teaching children to read. I also grabbed The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, by Jesse Wise. I'd had an impression that it didn't use sight words to help the kids get started before they learned the rules for those words (which isn't correct). But my sister-in-law has used it for her kids, and I respect the author a lot, so I thought, why not? I discovered that it was similar to the curriculum I had wanted, and we have been using it. The first 26 lessons review the letter sounds, which is what Helen needed. We are about half way through that part. And Helen has been doing very well! It's just what we've needed. I'm hoping that Helen can start reading short words by the end of June.

We also focused on colors and shapes (mostly colors) for Eric. We made a color sorting train (that turned into a color train that I just put on the wall) like one that I found online. He also did a shapes puzzle and put it together really well. We also did a shapes collage all together. Helen ended up doing most of it. One week we also checked out a colors discovery kit from the library, and that had some good books, including The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown. I think that one was Eric's favorite.

So far preschool has been a lot of fun and we're all (including me) learning a lot.

I have some pictures, but I will have to add them later when we finally find our camera ...