Homeschool Preschool- Week 4- Letter "D"

Our school mascot was locked up because of chronically bad behavior.

Preschool was cancelled last week due to sick children. So I was excited that we were able to meet on Tuesday. And....at our house! Our usual meeting place was empty this last week- a very lucky mommy and daddy got to take a trip all by themselves to Las Vegas.

This week, we learned about the letter D- for dinosaurs, daddies, and doctors. We are quite the lucky little co-op- one of our mommies is a mommy and a Physician's Assistant. She brought her whole traveling kit with her and we all got to look at each others' ears, throats, and noses (just kidding about the noses). We saw knee reflexes in action and learned about the tuning fork that it placed on heads to determine if there is hearing loss. I think Krista and I were way more excited about these things than the children.

Circle Time:
This consisted of the usual songs and countings and weathers and such. I got to lead it this time and it was really fun to get to sing with the kids and have them actually participate. Usually, by the time we get to Language, the attention spans of our children have been put through the wringer. So it was nice to have them fresh!

Then we introduced the letter "D" and read a great book called "My Daddy and I".

I used some big flashcards given to me by an older homeschool mommy to have the kids find the missing pictures that began with the letter D.

Art:
Krista keeps outdoing herself with her fun and captivating projects. The kids are all able to do the projects with a minimal amount of help from us mommies. This is a plus for everyone! This time, she gave the kids a piece of construction paper with three dollops of red, blue, and yellow tempura paint. Then we put a piece of wax paper over the paint and the kids got to smoosh the colors together to blend them and see what resulting colors came our of the smooshing. Later at home, we all cut them into rainbows.

Language:
We skipped most of the A Beka lesson in favor of having Laura demonstrate all of her totally cool physician tools. As I said, the mommies were captivated. Krista also brought a play doctor kit for the kids to touch and play with. Laura let each child listen to his or her heartbeat with the real stethoscope.

Bible:
After a recap of the letter "C", Laura gave the children their "D" coloring page and we tried memorizing Phil 2:14- "Do all things without complaining or grumbling". Mommy is learning so much at Bible time... The children then colored their pages and had snack.

Math:
Laura had cut out a labor-intensive number of shapes from magazines that looked like circles, squares, and triangles. Then the kids had to sort them into three piles. Seeing the little wheels turning in each head is very encouraging. Finally, she had them do a matching page, where two columns were set up with different shapes and they were to draw a line from, say, an oval in column "A" to an oval in column "B". Surprisingly, most of the kids could do the entire worksheet on their own. Progress!